“I think this is a good strategy by the board. It shows a clear focus on ASTar and at the same time opens possibilities to be able to further develop Podler outside of Q-linea and simplify for a partnership, sale, or continued development with separate financing of Podler”, said Jonas Jarvius, president and CEO of Q-linea.

Podler is a technology that has been developed by Q-linea which enables the diagnosis of patients with blood infections to be speeded up. Today, all blood cultures need to be incubated in dedicated blood culture cabinets to be able to enrich bacteria and alert in the presence of bacteria in the blood. This enrichment step is crucial for follow-up tests such as rapid AST and ID analysis.

Today, this enrichment takes place in blood culture cabinets placed mainly in the microbiology laboratories of hospitals. This means that the samples must be transported, both within the hospital and from neighboring hospitals that do not have blood culture capacity. During transport, there is no or limited growth in the sample, which means that diagnostics does not start until the sample is loaded into the blood culture cabinet. The transport can often take over 10 hours, which can be life-threatening for patients with blood infections.

Podler can be seen as a portable blood culture cabinet and enables the initiation of sample analysis directly at the patient, resulting in large time savings.