Ebola consortium using ViroCyt’s diagnostic tool

BOULDER – Life science startup ViroCyt, LLC announced Wednesday that its Virus Counter instrument is being used by a United States government-supported research consortium that is working to create vaccines and therapies for Ebola and Marburg viruses.

Boulder-based ViroCyt develops instrumentation and reagents that allow for the quantification of virus particles in a given sample in just minutes. It was formed early last year as a spinoff of Boulder-based InDevR Inc.

The Filovirus Animal Nonclinical Group (FANG) is an interagency group of laboratories in the United States trying to develop countermeasures against viruses such as Ebola, which is ravaging chunks of Africa with a current outbreak.

“The Virus Counter allows researchers to immediately determine how much virus is in a sample rather than waiting a long time for results using standard virological methods,” Peter Pushko, president of Medigen and a virus expert, said in the ViroCyt announcement. “The utilization of this technology by FANG, which can be standardized relatively easily, makes even more sense when you consider that there are many groups in different countries needing accurate and reproducible results that are consistent from one site to another.”

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