Respiratory testing volume doesn’t ramp up gradually — it spikes. Flu A/B, RSV, SARS-CoV-2, and Strep A panels that ran a few times a day in August can run dozens of times a shift by November. That surge strains staffing and turnaround and the QC program built to catch failures before they reach a patient result.
The gap a busy season exposes
A detection-only or synthetic control can pass every run and still miss a failure upstream (in lysis, extraction, or purification) because it enters the workflow at amplification. Under normal volume that gap is theoretical. Under flu-season volume, it gets more chances to matter. Full-process controls close it by using intact, inactivated organisms in a representative, patient-like matrix, so a run has to succeed at every step — not just the last one.
Sourced from the MDx-Chex® for RLP Technical Note: many commercial controls are “synthetic materials (e.g., plasmids or gene fragments) diluted in buffers, or intact organisms in a protein-like matrix, neither of which fully represents a respiratory sample” — and so fail to verify a system’s ability to process and remove matrix inhibitory effects.
Cold chain doesn’t scale with volume
Reconstitution, freeze-thaw windows, and cold storage are manageable at low volume; at peak season they become a bottleneck. Room-temperature, ready-to-use controls remove that step: no reconstitution, no freeze-thaw, no resuspension. QC doesn’t compete for bench time with patient samples.
Compliance doesn’t pause for peak season
CAP, CLSI EP23, and CLIA 42 CFR 493.1256 expectations don’t relax because volume is up. A verification path that pulls a tech off the bench for weeks mid-surge doesn’t survive contact with flu season.
Supply runs thin exactly when you need it most
When flu, RSV, SARS-CoV-2 and Strep A testing spikes at once across every lab, QC vendors feel that demand too. A control that’s backordered right when a lot runs low leaves a program without QC options during the weeks it can least afford to pause. Stocking up on MDx-Chex removes that variable before the season peaks. Waiting to find out removes the choice instead.
How MDx-Chex controls hold up under all four
MDx-Chex for RP is a full-process control for high-plex respiratory panels, and MDx-Chex for RLP covers Flu A, Flu B, Human Rhinovirus, RSV, SARS-CoV-2, and Strep A. Both are liquid, ready-to-use, and stable at room temperature. Both are validated to fit an existing IQCP, so a lot transition mid-season is a 1+4 Model run (1 confirmatory run plus 4 monitoring runs), not a 20-day validation. MDx-Chex for RLP shows 100% positive and 100% negative agreement across all Cepheid Xpert Xpress assays and the BioFire SPOTFIRE R/ST Mini across 3 independent lots (internal evaluation). That precision is what turns a lot transition into a clean audit instead of an open finding.
kNOw Streck. kNOw Quality.
MDx-Chex for RP and MDx-Chex for RLP are for Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.
