The team will work throughout the Bank Holiday weekend to finalise the kit before the next critical step, working in collaboration with the Molecular Diagnostic Centre in Alicante, Spain, to get it clinically validated.

BBC: Swine flu ID test kits 'imminent'

The researchers in the Science Translational Medicine paper, working directly with Illumina, first developed a diagnostic test that captured 600 genes that were likely to be the reason the babies wound up in the NICU. That panel is being sold as a kit by Illumina and will likely be used by some commercial laboratories that have government certifications to do diagnostic testing.

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