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Our CEO, Julian Hardy, is currently taking part in the 'All Roads Lead to Rome' cycling challenge in support of the 'My Name'5 Doddie Foundation' and Motor Neuron Disease. He is accompanying the Cycling Farmers Team from Scotland, specifically Oban, to the heart of Rome. Last year, the Doddie 555 ride raised £850k for Motor Neuron Disease research, and this year, the cycle aims to generate substantial funds to assist individuals impacted by Motor Neuron Disease. Please follow the journey in real-time and consider directly donating to MN5DF, with every penny going to MND research. Track their progress on social media using this tracking link and donate if you can by clicking here. Join us in making a difference and supporting a cause that truly matters.

Genpax, a life science startup focused on transforming healthcare in detecting, tracing, and mitigating the spread of bacterial pathogens, has been announced as a winner by the IET for their 2023 Excellence and Innovation Awards. The Awards celebrate the most pioneering engineering and technology innovations across 16 sectors, from energy and sustainability to manufacturing and healthcare. Chosen by a panel of expert judges, Genpax won the Health Technology award for their revolutionary pathogen analysis platform IDEM. Dr Nigel Saunders, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder, said, "I am delighted that IDEM has been recognised for its innovation. We look forward to making a difference in Infection Prevention and Control in Healthcare and beyond." Ed Almond, IET Chief Executive and Secretary, added: "The Excellence and Innovation Awards shine a spotlight on the ground-breaking innovations and best practices in engineering, science and technology, and the fantastic trailblazers changing the course of our future. Congratulations to every one of our winners; with your skills, commitment, and passion, you are proof of the positive difference engineers can make in transforming our world for the better." More information about this year's IET Excellence and Innovation Awards winners can be found at https://bit.ly/3QDaZyT. Our Story Founded in 2021, Genpax is committed to advancing the world's knowledge of bacterial pathogens by developing the most advanced suite of bacterial whole genome sequencing analytical tools and resources for healthcare, public health, and industry. IDEM is Genpax's first pathogen analysis platform for surveillance, and infection prevention and control (IPC). The platform unleashes the potential of whole genome sequencing (WGS) to detect and respond to emergent and antibiotic-resistant pathogens for patient and public safety. This year's awards took place on the 15th of November, 2023, at a ceremony at the Glasgow Science Centre. For more information, please visit genpax.co or for media enquiries, contact Genpax at press@genpax.co.

NEW YORK – Bioinformatics company Genpax estimates that healthcare systems can save considerable money while preventing infection outbreaks through microbial whole-genome sequencing. In a study published earlier this month in Microbial Genetics, the London-based company calculated that implementing a WGS surveillance strategy could prevent some 74,000 infections annually in England, saving the National Health Service approximately £480 million ($604.5 million) per year, amounting to a return on investment of £7.83 per pound invested in diagnostic WGS. Similarly, Genpax's model estimated a net saving in the US of roughly $3.2 billion, or $18.74 for every dollar invested, while preventing around 169,000 infections. "In the NHS, we're just always patching people up," said Susie Jerwood, Genpax's chief medical officer and formerly a medical consultant for the NHS. "Why can't we do a bit more stopping things [from] happening?" Genpax sees proactive microbial surveillance as a strong way to both prevent infectious outbreaks from spreading far in the first place and to break the chain of transmission of ongoing outbreaks. Conducting surveillance via WGS, says Jerwood, is the best way to do this because accessing the whole genome provides a clear and comprehensive view of the genetic connections between infections. "If you're just looking for housekeeping genes, for example," she said, "you're looking at, say, seven regions, and you might come out and say, well, these [microbes] are all the same because these regions look the same, but you've only looked at 50 percent, 70 percent of the genome. Maybe less." In contrast, depending on the species in question, WGS provides access to closer to 90 percent or more of the genome. "By looking at so much of the genome," Jerwood said, "you can tell quite clearly if something is related or not because if you have [even] a [single nucleotide polymorphism] difference, then you have a difference, whereas if you're looking at a smaller part [of the genome], you might not see that difference." Based on this guiding philosophy, Jerwood and her colleagues built an economic and health impact model to estimate both the impact of WGS-based surveillance directly on hospital resources such as consumables and antibiotics, and on the costs of allocating medical professionals and hospital resources before and after surveillance by WGS. The model included estimated infections, colonization by bugs with antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes, surveillance and detection of clusters by WGS, expected deaths, healthcare resources and costs, bed costs and stay lengths, and the cost of infection control and other relevant specialists. In all calculations, the Genpax team aimed to keep estimates conservative, such as avoiding the kinds of high-cost estimates that might unnecessarily concern decision-makers and being conservative with respect to calculating lengths of stay, as some patients are predisposed to long stays regardless of acquiring an infection while in the hospital. The resulting model suggested that proactive WGS surveillance in healthcare settings may significantly reduce infections, infection-related deaths, and all related expenses. Alexander Sundermann, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in microbial epidemiology, said in an email that the study provides "another piece of evidence in the recent growing literature that genomic surveillance for [healthcare-associated infections] is cost-beneficial for healthcare but also beneficial for patient safety." Sundermann has hands-on experience implementing microbial WGS surveillance, having developed one such program for use in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and its affiliated facilities. Last year, that program proved instrumental in enabling Sundermann and his colleagues to identify two drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections that traced to contaminated eyedrops. Sundermann praised Genpax's study for basing its assumptions on the most conservative parameters drawn from the studies that the company referenced in building its model. "Because of this," he said, "the paper gives me confidence that they could be accurate in an applied setting." Nonetheless, following the adage that "all models are wrong, but some are useful," he said that "there needs to be some direct evidence that genomic surveillance in a healthcare setting has a direct reduction in HAIs." Finding such evidence can be difficult, he explained, as it essentially involves demonstrating that a future outbreak that never occurred was due to a given intervention. This is not, Sundermann pointed out, to suggest that such a demonstration is impossible or not worthwhile. "Many studies that have performed genomic surveillance have uncovered outbreaks and transmission that would have never been detected without it," he said. "This alone, added with the multiple studies on economic value, should give pause to healthcare institutions who have not thought of using genomic surveillance for HAI prevention." Genpax is, in fact, now preparing a pilot study aimed at backing up its model with solid empirical data. The company has installed an Illumina sequencer in a hospital in southern England, has completed some preliminary work, and currently awaits ethics board approval. "We're putting our money where our mouth is," Jerwood said. "Rather than just saying that this a good theory … we are going to do our best to see whether actually using this [model] live, in real time, actually does do what we say it does." Although Jerwood said that Genpax is currently at a pre-commercial stage, the company is ready to begin taking on clients. So far, she said, the company has mainly done some pro bono work for a few clients "to show people what we can do." The business model is to analyze sequencing data generated by clients, charging on a per-analysis basis. At the moment, the firm's technology is optimized for Illumina sequence data, but it plans to begin accepting data from other platforms, such as Oxford Nanopore. Oxford Nanopore had, in fact, been a platform that Genpax had initially considered for its analysis, but at the time, Jerwood said that that platform appeared less stable than Illumina's and that contracts with Oxford Nanopore included a clause that placed certain restrictions on who could analyze its data. "I know it's got a much more stable platform, and they've taken that clause out," Jerwood said. "So they're definitely going to be on our list." Genpax's key differentiating technology lies in its ability to efficiently compare large numbers of microbial isolates, normally a computationally expensive task. While the precise details of how Genpax accomplishes this task amount to the company's "secret sauce," Nigel Saunders, the firm's CSO, attributed it to "a combination of underlying features linked to the near-zero-error high accuracy, and our novel reference-free interrogation solution." This solution, he said, enables all strains to be analyzed, comparing them by SNP, rather than summary information, as is more typically used. "Exactly how we do this is part of our trade secret IP," he said. Jerwood noted that one key aspect in WGS surveillance that can be easier to overlook in reactive testing — when seeking to identify organisms after an outbreak has occurred — is that antibiotic-sensitive organisms can do as much damage as antibiotic-resistant ones until caught and treated. "In the UK," she said, "sequencing is only used if you've got a bug you're worried about," such as in the case that a hospital discovers two resistant bacteria and wants to know if they're related. "But if you have two patients in next-door beds and they both have the same fully sensitive E. coli, don't you want to know about that, too?" Beyond the healthcare setting, Genpax aims to tackle other areas where microbial infection is a concern, such as in agriculture and food production. "Food is a huge, huge area that we're really hoping to help," Jerwood said. An outbreak of Listeria, for example, may not go away simply by treating affected cows or recalling certain batches of cheese, but by identifying the outbreak's exact origin. "With the high resolution that we've got," Jerwood said, "you can actually look back and say where [the infection] came from rather than just saying yes, [the bugs] are related and probably had something to do with each other."

To access the full paper visit : https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.001087 Abstract Bacterial healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a substantial source of global morbidity and mortality. The estimated cost associated with HAIs ranges from $35 to $45 billion in the USA alone. The costs and accessibility of whole genome sequencing (WGS) of bacteria and the lack of sufficiently accurate, high-resolution, scalable and accessible analysis for strain identification are being addressed. Thus, it is timely to determine the economic viability and impact of routine diagnostic bacterial genomics. The aim of this study was to model the economic impact of a WGS surveillance system that proactively detects and directs interventions for nosocomial infections and outbreaks compared to the current standard of care, without WGS. Using a synthesis of published models, inputs from national statistics, and peer-reviewed articles, the economic impacts of conducting a WGS-led surveillance system addressing the 11 most common nosocomial pathogen groups in England and the USA were modelled. This was followed by a series of sensitivity analyses. England was used to establish the baseline model because of the greater availability of underpinning data, and this was then modified using USA-specific parameters where available. The model for the NHS in England shows bacterial HAIs currently cost the NHS around £3 billion. WGS-based surveillance delivery is predicted to cost £61.1 million associated with the prevention of 74 408 HAIs and 1257 deaths. The net cost saving was £478.3 million, of which £65.8 million were from directly incurred savings (antibiotics, consumables, etc.) and £412.5 million from opportunity cost savings due to re-allocation of hospital beds and healthcare professionals. The USA model indicates that the bacterial HAI care baseline costs are around $18.3 billion. WGS surveillance costs $169.2 million, and resulted in a net saving of ca.$3.2 billion, while preventing 169 260 HAIs and 4862 deaths. From a ‘return on investment’ perspective, the model predicts a return to the hospitals of £7.83 per £1 invested in diagnostic WGS in the UK, and US$18.74 per $1 in the USA. Sensitivity analyses show that substantial savings are retained when inputs to the model are varied within a wide range of upper and lower limits. Modelling a proactive WGS system addressing HAI pathogens shows significant improvement in morbidity and mortality while simultaneously achieving substantial savings to healthcare facilities that more than offset the cost of implementing diagnostic genomics surveillance.

A recent economic modelling paper by Genpax, published in Microbial Genomics, concludes that in England, the National Health Service (NHS) could save close to £0.5bn and prevent 1200 avoidable deaths, and the US health system over $3bn and 4,800 deaths by implementing whole genome sequencing (WGS) as a tool to control bacterial healthcare-associated infections. Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a huge economic burden to global healthcare systems. They currently cost the English NHS over £3bn a year and the US health system over $18bn. While WGS has the potential to revolutionize how HAIs are controlled it has yet to be deployed widely. Genpax, an innovative bioinformatics company, has built an extensive and detailed economic and health impact model to evaluate the potential impact of widely implementing a WGS-led intervention strategy in England and the USA. This economic model examined the potential for WGS to prevent outbreaks, safeguard vulnerable patient populations, substantially reduce the transmission rates of bacterial HAIs, and reduce the burden of antimicrobial resistance in healthcare settings. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is where microbes become resistant to antimicrobials that would normally treat the infection. AMR is a serious global issue and was associated with nearly 5 million deaths worldwide in 2019 according to the CDC. This model concluded that implementing this strategy could prevent 74,000 infections, equating to around 700,000 bed days and saving approximately £480 million for the NHS in England annually, yielding a return on investment of £7.83 for every pound invested in diagnostic WGS. Applying the model to the USA projected a net saving of around $3.2 billion and a greater return on investment of $18.74 for every $1 invested. This economic model has major implications for health policymakers, healthcare leaders, and diagnostic providers as it shows the overwhelming benefits of the broad-scale deployment of this technology. The full paper, "Economic and health impact modelling of a Whole Genome Sequencing-led intervention strategy for bacterial Healthcare-Associated Infections for England and the USA," by John M. Fox, Nigel J. Saunders, Susie H. Jerwood is available at the following URL: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/mgen/10.1099/mgen.0.001087, DOI: 10.1099/mgen.0.001087

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Genpax attend ASM microbe in Houston from the 15th to the 19th of June, where we present seven posters on our analytical capabilities. Find us or email research@genpax.co if you would like to meet there. Our posters will be available here on our website from the 17th of June. SNP-resolution analysis for Listeria monocytogenes https://www.genpax.co/post/snp-resolution-analysis-for-listeria-monocytogenes Reference-free Whole Genome SNP analysis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa https://www.genpax.co/post/reference-free-whole-genome-snp-analysis-of-pseudomonas-aeruginosa Reference-free WGS SNP-resolution analysis of Campylobacter jejuni https://www.genpax.co/post/reference-free-wgs-snp-resolution-analysis-of-campylobacter-jejuni A novel genome comparison tool for same-patient samples of E. coli ST131 https://www.genpax.co/post/a-novel-genome-comparison-tool-for-same-patient-samples-of-e-coli-st131 Large-scale hospital outbreak analysis of Klebsiella pneumoniae https://www.genpax.co/post/large-scale-hospital-outbreak-analysis-of-klebsiella-pneumoniae Novel genome comparison tool for Staphylococcus aureus https://www.genpax.co/post/novel-genome-comparison-tool-for-staphylococcus-aureus Economic and health impact modelling of a Whole Genome Sequencing-led intervention strategy for bacterial Healthcare-Associated Infections for England and for the USA https://www.genpax.co/post/putting-numbers-on-the-economics-of-wgs