Rqmicro supports the Berlin Water Company and its 4000 employees to detect Legionella, a severe form of pneumonia. The startup developed specific kits to simplify, improve and accelerate the detection of Legionella in less than two hours.
The ETH Zurich spin-off rqmicro, has announced its collaboration with the Berlin Water Company (BWB). The latter is one of the biggest companies in Germany specialized in delivering and cleaning of water. Its 4000 employees supply from nine water plants more than 200 million cubic meters best quality drinking water and clean approximately 245 million cubic meters sewage water in their six wastewater treatment plants per year.
To guarantee safe water, BWB’s lab analyzes 20,000 samples yearly. The early detection of Legionella is becoming important. As in Switzerland, Germany faces an increase in the Legionnaire’s disease for the last years. According to the Robert Koch Institute, a German federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention, there are more fatalities due to this disease than from road accidents.
In the recent tests, BWB relied of rqmicro's Legionella solution in a fast test. The solution met all the requirements and currently introduced at company. In the future, BWB plans to use the tests regularly for drinking water systems in 200 buildings.
“We were looking for a solution to diagnose the Legionella concentration as fast as possible”, says Uta Böckelmann, head of BWB’s accredited laboratory.
Rqmicro develops products that are designed to provide fast, cost-effective and reliable solutions for various challenges of microbiological analysis. Among its products are specific kits designed to simplify, improve and accelerate the detection of pathogens from different types of aqueous sample matrices in less than two hours.
Its «Legionella pneumophila SG1» and the Legionella pneumophila kits present a revolutionary solution for Legionella analysis and thus open a new chapter in the field of pathogen detection and in the monitoring of water. In combination with the rqmicro instruments for manual or automated immunomagnetic separation, the analytical kits provide a complete solution for sample preparation.
(Press release/ran)
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