(Melbourne, Australia.– June 10, 2010) PREVI™ Isola, a breakthrough medical instrument that delivers a faster, more precise and cost-efficient way to process patient specimens, has been awarded the prestigious 2010 Gold Medical Design Excellence Award. The MDEA award recognizes advances in the design of medical products that improve healthcare delivery and change traditional medical practices.

bioMérieux, a world leader in in vitro diagnostics, partnered with LBT Innovations Ltd, the technology’s developer, and Invetech, the device’s designer and manufacturer, to create PREVI Isola.

This breakthrough technology will greatly improve the efficiency of microbiology labs all over the world by replacing the current time-consuming, costly, manual process of agar plate streaking with a fully automated approach –using a patented applicator to maximize microorganism colony isolation, eliminate cross-contamination risks, and standardize plate inoculation with better traceability.

Based on an LBT Innovations invention by Australian medical scientist John Glasson and engineer Lachlan Smith, PREVI Isola is able to process 180 plates per hour, shortening time to result, saving technicians’ time and greatly improving laboratory workflow.

“bioMérieux is proud to see PREVI Isola recognized by this prestigious award,” said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of bioMérieux, “I would like to thank our partners at LBT Innovations and Invetech and our teams at bioMérieux for making it possible for us to bring this visionary solution to our customers. As the world leader in microbiology, bioMérieux is driving microbiology lab automation, with new systems and IT solutions for rapid time to results, which will result in rapid time to therapy for patients. Our goal is to transform microbiology to better serve our customers, clinicians and their patients.”

LBT Innovations’ chief executive officer Lusia Guthrie said the award was a fitting recognition for the technology, which has substantially improved scientific workplaces all over the world.

“It is imperative that microbiology laboratories meet the changing needs of growing populations and growing demand,” she said. “PREVI™ Isola capitalizes on the estimated 20 percent workload increase demanded of modern laboratories.”

The partnership of bioMérieux, LBT Innovations and Invetech was instrumental in advancing PREVI Isola from an initial concept to an award-winning product that will forever change the microbiology lab automation landscape.

“Collaborating with global leaders and visionary enterprises such as bioMérieux and LBT Innovations to develop world-first products like PREVI Isola is what truly energizes Invetech,” says Dr. Fred Davis, President of Invetech. “It is very rewarding to help develop and manufacture breakthrough products like this that greatly improve the lives of people all over the world enabling faster and more sensitive disease diagnosis.”

Agar plate inoculation is a repetitive, manually intensive microbiology process that has not changed significantly in over 100 years. Plates are traditionally streaked by hand in a time-consuming and costly process that is prone to human error and variation between samples. PREVI Isola produces a uniform streaking pattern as well as a larger more repeatable sample of bacterial colonies. It dispenses sample on to an agar plate with a pipettor guided by an ultrasonic sensor and a machine vision system. Sample is then automatically streaked using a novel disposable that has been designed to maximize streaking.

Typically located in large hospitals and pathology companies, PREVI Isola will enable laboratories worldwide to increase their responsiveness, throughput and effectiveness of disease detection, improve staff retention by eliminating tedious and repetitive core tasks, and create significant cost savings. Launched in 2008 at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), PREVI Isola systems are now installed in laboratories in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The MDEA Award will be officially presented in a ceremony at the Medical Design & Manufacturing East 2010 Conference and Exposition in New York in June. Representatives from bioMérieux, LBT Innovations, and Invetech will be present to receive the award.