Product Applications

Overview

Safeguard’s ability to detect DNA from pathogens presents a large number of market applications in a number of industries. These include human and animal diagnostics, integrity of food production, crop genomics and disease detection, environmental protection. Currently Safeguard is prioritizing two key target market markets: Human Diagnostics and Animal Welfare.

Human Diagnostics

Rapid diagnosis of infection which provides information to physicians enabling swift and appropriate therapy, leads to optimum medical care. As the Safeguard technology excels in the rapid detection of bloodstream infections, it is potentially a critical sentinel in pathogenic infection that could lead to sepsis. In 2017 there were an estimated 11m sepsis-related deaths worldwide. For the majority of these patients, microbial therapy would have been standard of care and early and accurate identification of pathogens would have enabled the most appropriate treatment.

Early diagnosis of less severe infections, enabling appropriate antimicrobial therapy can help reduce morbidity, cost of concurrent treatment and limit the emergence of antimicrobial resistance.

Safeguard’s system lends itself to providing central reference and hospital laboratories with a rapid, concise and cost-effective alternative to conventional microbiology methods.

Animal Diagnostics

In North America some 50m tests for pathogens in milk are conducted by 49 Dairy Herd Improvement Associations (DHIs). Mastitis and other infections of dairy cattle have a major impact on herd health and milk production; hence they are of considerable economic importance. They also present a risk of transmission into the human food chain as well as inappropriate use of antibiotics in cattle in cases where there is no evidence of infection. Working with the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine (world leaders in the field), Safeguard has developed a pathogen panel and DNA extraction protocol for milk to address the major North American market for testing in the dairy industry. DairyGuard is currently being beta-tested in conjunction with a leading DHI.