Now supporting both Illumina short-read and Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing platforms, the NGD200 is the industry's first to enable WGS-based hospital transmission detection.

CAMBRIDGE, MA / ACCESS Newswire / June 8, 2026 / NGD Infection Prevention announced today that its automated sequence-based infection transmission detection system is now compatible with Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing. The automation, throughput and simplicity of use of the NGD200 sample preparation robotic system and NGD's integrated automated bioinformatics are now all available for Nanopore sequencing.

Infection prevention teams increasingly recognize that comparing the whole genome sequence (WGS) of infections is the only way to catch transmission as more than 90% of bacterial transmission in hospitals remaining undetected despite diligent efforts.[1]^,[2] The use of sequencing was until recently impractical, requiring specialized expertise and often only available at unpalatable costs - the NGD200 was designed to close that gap. A low-skill technician loads bacterial samples, prepares reagents, starts the run, and walks away. The NGD200 performs lysis, extraction, normalization, library construction, pooling, and size selection in a single automated run. Four hours later the system delivers 48 barcoded, sequence-ready libraries ready to be sequenced.

Actionable sequencing-based infection relatedness results flow automatically into NGD EpiAssist, NGD's HIPAA-compliant bioinformatics and root-cause determination platform. EpiAssist rapidly determines whether newly sequenced samples are identical (e.g. within 10 SNPs in the entire core genome) to any prior isolates - enabling infection prevention teams to identify outbreaks at the 2nd patients, intervene early, before a single transmission event becomes a larger outbreak. Isolates available in the morning are transformed into relatedness and infection transmission results the next morning, populating an intuitive interface that creates the map of the time-and-place history of each patient, including ward location, procedures and caregivers, identifying and ranking potentially causal linkages, dramatically reducing the time required for outbreak investigation and root cause identification. Now with the expansion to Nanopore sequencing, NGD's system can deliver plasmid copy number and identity, further insights benefiting the work of the Infection Prevention team.

The NGD200 is available as part of NGD's complete, on-premises turnkey service - encompassing installation, structured onboarding, and dedicated ongoing technical and operational support. The full NGD solution, from automated sample preparation through sequencing, bioinformatics, and actionable IP team reporting, makes routine, real-time infection transmission detection operationally and economically achievable in the hospital setting for the first time.

About NGD Infection Prevention

NGD Infection Prevention provides a fully automated, end-to-end whole-genome sequencing platform and bioinformatics pipeline, enabling hospitals to detect and prevent transmission in real-time. The NGD200 system processes 48 bacterial samples with minimal low-skill hands-on time, while NGD EpiAssist automates bioinformatics as well as root cause determination, delivering actionable reports overnight at the low per-sample cost needed for broad adoption. The company has a laboratory in Cambridge MA, a business office in Boston, and a subsidiary in Israel.

Media Contact: Nicole Brokob
Director of Marketing & Communications, NGD
[email protected]
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