By Sameer Saral,Trivitron Diagnostics Pvt. Ltd., India

India has the second largest population and ranks first among the countries worldwide with the highest number of tuberculosis cases.

According to the World Health Organization’s Global Tuberculosis Control: WHO Report 2004, more than onefifth of all TB cases worldwide were in India. TB remains the leading infectious cause of death in India, killing close to 500,000 people each year. TB mainly
affects Indians of lower economic classes, who are unable to afford treatment or susceptibility testing.

In addition, physicians prescribe drugs directly in order to save treatment costs. This has led to a number of outbreaks with multi-drug resistant cases in TB. The problems of HIV and multi-drug resistance makes the tuberculosis epidemic in India much worse.

India also has a high prevalence of infectious diseases. This scenario requires a culture system with faster time-todetection (TTD) with low reagent cost, such as the VersaTREK® System.

Until 2004, BD and BMX were the market leaders in the microbiology testing segment in India. In 2004, Trivitron launched TREK products in India. Trivitron, one of the top 5 medical technology companies in India, specializes in handling closed systems. Since launching TREK products in India, Trivitron has set up 11 Versa- TREK installations all
over the country.

As a promotional activity, Trivitron organized a successful series of scientific symposia on
automation in microbiology across the country, with Dr. Vince LaBombardi from New York
City as a guest speaker. These were attended by the leading decision makers in the field of microbiology. Thanks to Mr. Paul Daga and Ms. Maureen Mansfield from TREK Diagnostic Systems for their support.

Metropolis Laboratory, Mumbai, who started off with the VersaTREK 96 bottle model, currently uses two VersaTREK 240 instruments and experiences faster TTD and almost no false positives. Operators are very satisfied with the new detection and VorTrexing™ technology, as well as overall performance. The LIS capability is also highly regarded by the lab staff.

Other VersaTREK customers, such as Gokula Metropolis, Bangalore praise its enhanced sensitivity which has enabled technicians to recover distinct organisms even from neonatal
samples.

A new TREK Sensititre® system (AutoReader and SWIN™ software) has been recently installed in Guwahati. According to the end user, “ It is a great instrument with good software and hardware features.” The only thing which might affect the promotion of
this product in India is the hardware and reagent prices, which are high for the Indian market. The reagent plate format does not meet Indian standards. This restricts us from offering complete solutions for automated microbial testing.

Trivitron is working with TREK to customize the ID and Susceptibility systems to suit Indian requirements. We hope customized plates will offer the best solutions to Indian customers and provide TREK with an edge over other manufacturers.