Roche has entered the arena of microbiology diagnostics with its August acquisition of Los Gatos, California–based GeneWEAVE. Roche will pay GeneWEAVE $190 million upfront plus another $235 million in product milestones for the biotech's Smarticles technology, a rapid phenotype-based system that detects live bacteria directly from clinical samples and assesses antibiotic susceptibility, a platform with potential uses in disease surveillance and testing in hospitals. GeneWEAVE, in stealth mode for several years, first publicly displayed its technology at the November 2014 meeting of the Association for Molecular Pathology. “There was a lot of expression of interest following that,” says CEO Steve Tablak. Smarticles are based on non-replicating bacteriophages containing DNA probes that bind to a specific bacterial genus or family of bacteria combined with synthetically designed plasmids containing luciferase genes. On contact with the drug-resistant bacteria, the DNA construct is activated causing the bacteria to express luciferase, producing light, which can be detected in an assay. GeneWEAVE is competing with Tucson, Arizona–based Accelerate Diagnostics, which is developing a fluorescent in situ hybridization-based system, and a PCR-based system from BioFire, the molecular diagnostics affiliate of bioMérieux in Salt Lake City, Utah.