Congratulations to the One Codex team! Read about the “No-Petri Dish” Challenge on their blog: 

“We’re excited to announce that the CDC’s Advanced Molecular Detection initiative has named One Codex as the winner of its $200K “No-Petri-Dish” Challenge! We are thrilled to be recognized by a world-leading public health agency and excited to begin offering solutions for next-generation public health and epidemiology.

The “No-Petri-Dish” Diagnostic Test Challenge asked participants to develop a fast “straight-to-strain” method for identifying a type of E. coli known as STEC (a common cause of severe foodborne outbreaks). Current tests available to public health officials fall into two major categories: “culture-based” tests, which require growing a bacterial culture and can take days or weeks to complete; and faster, but significantly less informative tests for specific pathogens or toxins (e.g., PCR-based tests).

Our approach uses next-generation sequencing (NGS) data to offer fast, high-resolution diagnostic results. We developed a unique solution that is effective even for metagenomic samples with extremely low concentrations of E. coli or other pathogens (<= 1X coverage). This ultimately promises to help public health officials identify, track, and monitor outbreaks in near real-time.”