Stilla Technologies offers a digital PCR solution to detect Covid-19 infections more sensitively and more accurately than the current RT-PCR method

Paris, May 5th, 2020

The Naica™ system, Stilla Technologies’ innovative digital PCR solution, combined with a Covid-19 detection kit, is able to quickly, accurately and reliably identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is responsible for Covid-19, as well as measure its viral load. At the moment, the naica^® system is mainly being used for research, and the company plans on expanding its use to diagnosis

Stilla Technologies, a leading French provider of pioneering solutions for high‐precision genetic analyses, just announced that its digital PCR solution, the Naica™ system, which can reliably detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus and measure its viral load, is now readily available to all research centers and hospitals involved in the fight against Covid- 19.

Currently, SARS-CoV-2 infections are being diagnosed through a method called real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). However, this technique fails to reliably detect low viral loads, which can occur when patients are mildly infected or in case of defective sampling. The difficulty to properly detect the virus with RT-PCR in these instances would partially explain why some Covid-19 patients test negative for SARS-CoV-2. Stilla’s solution based on digital PCR (dPCR), a more accurate and sensitive method than RT-PCR, would make it possible to cut down on these false negative results, which currently hamper efforts to contain the re-emergence of the disease.