This year, we were lucky enough to be invited both by BioMerieux and Beckton Dickinson to attend their respective European test labs to prove inter-operability between SEDRI-LIMS and their suite of microbiology analysers. In February, Tom, Ian and Matt visited BioMerieux labs in Lyon and were joined by Janet Midega from Wellcome. Gabriel Pedone, Director of Strategic Partnerships at BioMerieux, was our excellent host for the week. We first met Gabriel at the ReLavra+ conference in Colombia, at which he extended the invite. Gabriel really looked after us during our stay, ensuring all of our needs were met and that we had all the right equipment and expertise on hand. He also took us to a restaurant down town for what must be the best meal I have enjoyed in many years! Assisting with the testing were Vincent Gouges, Kevin Vatoux and Reynard Brice, who were all super helpful and accommodating.
After a kick-off meeting, a well received demo of SEDRI-LIMS to the local team and a tour of the impressive VIP suite, including a video on the history of the company, we got to work. Fortunately, despite some initial teething problems with cables and connectors, we managed a successful bi-directional communication with the BacT/Alert 3D blood culture system in the first morning, finding only a minor wrinkle that afternoon, which we fixed on the spot. The Vitek 2 took a little longer, mainly due to FTP server setup challenges and because a real E.coli test specimen was used (lab coats on!), hence the system needed to run overnight to deliver a result. By day 3, we had fully proved BacT/ALERT and Vitek 2 interop and, while we did not have a Vitek MS on site to test against, the message exchanges for the MS (a MALDI-ToF) are a subset of those supported by the Vitek 2, given the Vitek MS provides organism information only and not susceptibility data (except where implicit in the organism strain).
On Thursday morning, we had a wash-up meeting with Gabriel, Janet and the rest of the team. Everyone was delighted with the outcome and Gabriel pledged that BioMerieux would be endorsing SEDRI-LIMS as a supporting LIMS for its microbiology instruments. Furthermore, he would connect us with existing deployments that do not currently have a LIMS as well as consider us for all new deployments of the relevant instruments in appropriate territories.
With that, we took the Eurostar back to the UK, a day earlier than planned, thereby avoiding Friday's train strikes around Paris. Bonus!
Article first published: 27/02/24