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A Salt Lake City biomedical company is seeking emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that would allow hospitals to use its laboratory tool to quickly test patients for Ebola.

BioFire Defense, formerly part of Idaho Technology Inc., a University of Utah spin-off, has a toaster-sized diagnostic tool that helps doctors determine which bloodstream, respiratory or gastrointestinal bug is making a patient ill.

The tool, called FilmArray, could also be used to test for Ebola — if the FDA agrees.

The FDA this fall gave three other emergency authorizations for Ebola tests, one developed with the help of the Department of Defense and two from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Matt Scullion, vice president of sales and marketing for BioFire Defense, confirmed Tuesday that the company is in discussions with the FDA, but said he does not know when a decision will be made.

"It's a matter of us getting all our information to them," said Scullion, who described the FDA as "responsive."

"They are moving very, very quickly in these things."

Scullion declined to discuss whether the U.S. Department of Defense already is using FilmArray to test for Ebola in Africa. But an assistant defense secretary implied earlier this month that the company's polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, diagnostic tools are in use in west Africa, where nearly 5,000 have died in the latest Ebola outbreak.

The defense department last March awarded BioFire Defense a $240 million, eight-year contract to expand FilmArray into a broader biological warfare detection system.

Its sister company, BioFire Diagnostics, was poised to announce Wednesday plans for a $55 million state-of-the-art building in Salt Lake City to accommodate growth. The company said in a news advisory that it expects to create hundreds of high-paying jobs over the next several years.

Patented in 2012, the FilmArray requires two minutes of a lab worker's time to prepare a sample. In about an hour, the machine can analyze human blood or saliva at the molecular level, finding genetic markers for various diseases and posting the result on a laptop computer.

Two years ago, the FDA approved the company's test panel for respiratory diseases. Last May, BioFire's gastrointestinal test was approved.

The machines run $39,500. Individual tests are $129 each.

Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City has five FilmArray units it uses to test for respiratory viruses and other organisms, said spokeswoman Bonnie Midget.

And in June, BioFire announced an agreement to supply FilmArray units to HealthTrust Purchasing Group's 1,400 hospitals. The Tennessee-based company signed a three-year agreement.

The companies did not disclose the value of the deal.

The Utah company was founded by Kirk Ririe, who remains chief executive, and University of Utah pathologist Carl Wittwer in Idaho Falls in 1990, but it later moved to the university's Research Park.

The privately held company was purchased earlier this year by bioMérieux, a French medical diagnostics company, and it split into two subsidiaries: BioFire Defense and BioFire Diagnostics. Both remain based in Salt Lake City.

Twitter: @KristenMoulton