Quidel Taps ICS to Collaborate on Next-Gen Diagnostic Instruments for COVID Pathogen Detection

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Peter Winston

WALTHAM, Mass.– Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc. (“ICS”), design and development partners for the medtech industry, announced its collaboration with the Quidel Corporation (NASDAQ:QDEL) (“Quidel”), a provider of rapid diagnostic testing solutions, cellular-based virology assays and molecular diagnostic systems. Quidel enlisted ICS’ multidisciplinary team to be the application developer of the next-generation, fully integrated molecular diagnostic system for its Savanna® platform. The low-cost, point-of-care testing platform allows for easy rapid results for disease states and conditions such as COVID-19, MRSA and HIV.

The Savanna project started with UX design leading to an intuitive CLIA-waived touchscreen interface and an extensible processing architecture. It also includes software applications and powerful, forward-looking cybersecurity for its fleet in the field.

“Supplementing our team with ICS’ skilled software engineers and designers enabled us to bring the development process in house, resulting in a more responsive development cycle and tighter coupling with UX design,” said Johannes Kehle, Vice President, Savanna and Managing Director Quidel Germany GmbH. “It goes without saying, this outcome couldn’t have happened at a more imperative time.”

With Savanna, Quidel will deploy a future-proof in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) platform that’s flexible, scalable, configurable and secure. In its collaboration with ICS, Quidel convenes best-practices from usability, cybersecurity, cloud and user management on an embedded touch-screen platform.

“Quidel’s research and development of novel diagnostic technologies have been impacting global health for more than four decades, even more vitally during the pandemic,” ICS founder and CEO Peter Winston said. “We are gratified to be working with their talented team on products that contribute to better health outcomes, and in many cases saving lives.”

ICS has collaborated with Quidel on other point-of-care technologies, which have received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ICS assisted Quidel in bringing development in-house, setting up a new continuous integration (CI) system to build the software and run automated unit tests, enabling the generation of new software releases following a development and test process that meets the stringent requirements of medical devices. ICS also designed and implemented new product features, including an IoT-based facility for software updates and remote device management.