altona Diagnostics wants to thank everyone who visited us at the ECCMID in Copenhagen this year. It was a pleasure to meet so many lab professionals and talk about altona’s AltoStar® automation system as well as our broad real-time PCR test portfolio. View our image gallery.

On the 14th of April is World Chagas disease Day. Chagas is a neglected tropical disease and is endemic in about 21 countries in the Americas. It is vector-borne and caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan parasite. With the RealStar® Chagas PCR Kit 1.0 altona Diagnostics provides an in vitro diagnostic test for the qualitative detection of T. cruzi specific DNA.

altona Diagnostics invites you to the 33rd European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen. We are proud to participate with our new 55 sqm booth C3/17, promoting our AltoStar® automation system as well as our broad real-time PCR test portfolio.

The CE-marked ExtraStar® Purification Kit 2.0 is out now. It is used for the automated isolation and purification of nucleic acids in combination with the KingFisher™ Flex Purification System (Thermo Fisher Scientific).

The FlexStar® (RT-)PCR Amplification Mix 1.5 is now available in a new configuration, containing enough reagents to perform 96 real-time PCRs. The product is designed for the real-time PCR based amplification and detection of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) derived from human specimens.

Two RealStar® Hantavirus PCR kits are out now. The RealStar® Hantavirus-HPS RT-PCR Kit 1.0 (RUO) is a reagent system, based on real-time PCR technology, for the qualitative detection of RNA specific for hantavirus species causing pulmonary syndrome (HPS). The second new product, the RealStar® Hantavirus-HFRS RT-PCR Kit 1.0 (RUO), is designed for the qualitative detection and differentiation of RNA specific for hantavirus species causing hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS).