Oxford Nanopore Technologies has teamed up with Day Zero Diagnostics (DZD) for the development of an end-to-end solution to diagnose bloodstream infections, a major cause of sepsis.

The collaboration aims to create a diagnostic system to offer same-day identification and genomic-based antibiotic susceptibility profiling, eliminating the need for blood culture.

This system will integrate DZD’s sample preparation technology and its AI-driven Keynome microbial identification and antibiotic susceptibility pipeline with sequencing reads from Oxford Nanopore’s small-format PromethION 2 Solo.

The collaboration intends to create a fully automated sample processing and sequencing workflow for clinical hospital labs.

Furthermore, the companies intend to seek regulatory approvals, including from the US Food and Drug Administration, in the future.

The real-time, scalable features and advances in single-nucleotide sequencing accuracy of the Oxford Nanopore platform make it suitable for the rapid characterisation of pathogens in clinical samples.

Oxford Nanopore CEO Gordon Sanghera said: “We are excited to partner with Day Zero Diagnostics to bring the benefits of nanopore sequencing to fight bloodstream infections.

“Our hope is that the rapid results, high accuracy and accessibility of the Oxford Nanopore system, combined with DZD’s expertise and workflow, will make it possible for more people to access a solution that’s fast and effective in the fight against bloodstream infections.”

Earlier this year, Oxford Nanopore announced a partnership with Geneyx to develop a scalable software solution for use in nanopore sequencing.