Santa Cruz Startup Detects Tick-Borne Diseases

Local Santa Cruz startup Pathogenomix launched a pathogen identification software several years ago called RipSeq NGS. Recently, the Mayo Clinic released a new article in JCM (Journal of Microbiology) by American Society for Microbiology suggesting RipSeq can be used as a new way for detecting tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease.

The main point of the article is that cases of tick-borne diseases have steadily increased, and a majority of tick-borne infections are caused by bacteria. Clinical diagnosis may be challenging as many tick-borne diseases have similar symptoms. Traditional laboratory diagnostics often fail and are expensive. The article suggests and tests a new optimized NGS workflow, including using Pathogenomix RipSeq NGS software for the data analyses.

"It is amazing when we work day out and day in, and then discover that an important customer finds such great value in our product!" says Oystein Saebo, CTO Pathogenomix. "This is one of the many use cases for our software. As the sequencing price is coming down we see more and more that complex infections can be diagnosed faster and more accurately - so patients get the correct treatment earlier. Saving lives and suffering is what motivates us to keep improving and further develop our platform."

RipSeq can identify bacteria in minutes rather than days.

The abstract can be found here: https://jcm.asm.org/content/early/2021/02/19/JCM.03129-20

When Oystein is not building the next super biotech company, he can been seen mountain biking our coastal range. Oystein and his family moved from Norway to Santa Cruz.

Oystein in his home office

Oystein enjoying the non-alcoholic type of wild turkeys in our coastal mountains