Daniel Larrimore writes,
<I am employed by a pharmaceutical company that does mainly contract
work. We recently purchased a Vitek system for microbial identification.
I was wondering if anyone else in the industry had any suggestions or
what has been previously done as far as validation protocols for the
system. Any help/suggestions would be greatly
appreciated.>
We use a Vitek too. When you say validation, do you mean the computer
part or the cards? I can tell you about the cards (I'll ask about the
computer if you want, though). When we get a new batch of cards in, I QC
one of each batch by running a known organism from stock culture which
the particular card would be used to ID. For the GNI card, we use E.
coli. For the GPI card, it's S. aureus. For NFC it's P. aeruginosa, and
for the Bacillus card, B. subtilis. The machine readily identifies these
organisms, so on that basis we "trust" it. Why we don't do negative
controls for GPI, NFC and Bacillus, I don't know, but I'll find out.
Infectionately,
Yersinia.
