re: (not) due for a bounce, one to watch!
Hi stevecam, There are 4 or 5 competing Point of Care products already commercially available in Europe and North America. These include the ABL 77 by Radiometer (Brønshøj, Denmark), the i-Stat by Abbott Laboratories (Abbott Park, IL), and the Micromat II by Bio-Rad (Hercules, CA). There are also some promising bio-sensors under development re bio-terror/anthrax etc which are receiving large US defence/department of homeland security grants. (A few years ago ABI was an early recipent of a USD research grant to develop a bio-terror sensor, but the company was unable to come up with anything useful in a sensible time frame and has since been dropped by US govt agencies as a funding receipient).
If you speak to ABI management, they will tell you that sensidx promises to be able to detect a greater range of substances, with a higher degree of accuracy than the commerical products mentioned above. However, this is true only in the laboratory setting. Sensidx is proving to be rather inacurrate when used in a hospital setting, as sensidx's previous external validation sadly showed. It is likely that the current hospital trials will acheive better results. However, these results need to be 'pefect' (i.e., unambiguous/problem free) for ABI is fast running out of time if it wants to acheive meaningful North American market penetration. By the time the first generation of sensidx hits the US market (factoring is a few more delays, FDA approval etc, this will probably be in around 3 years, but possibly longer), some of these competing companies will have released second or third generation point of care units which are likely to match or exceed sensidx (at least the laboratory version) in both accuracy and breadth of detectable compounds.
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