Diagnostics - The Easy Way

Infectious diseases are a serious scourge of humanity. The impact of infections caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa ranges from harmless symptoms to untreatable lethal consequences. The geographical extension of infectious diseases is varying locally. In less developed tropical regions Malaria alone is causing more than 200 million new infections per annum while hospital-acquired infections – pathogens that have become resistant to antibiotics – kill more than 150,000 people annually in industrial countries.

Many patients could be rescued by applying fast and sensitive diagnostics that would facilitate a targeted medical treatment at the very first signs and mostly still unspecific symptoms of the infection. But fast, sensitive and easily manageable diagnostic methods would also be beneficial for the treatment of non-lethal and less serious infections: the earlier a diagnosis is available, the earlier a targeted therapy can be applied.

Zendia’s mission is the development of fast, sensitive and easy-to-run products for direct point of care diagnostics.

Infectotest^® is the core of our development projects – an innovative assay platform for specific quantitative detection and identification of infectious pathogens from a drop of blood within a few minutes. It is based on a highly sensitive miniaturised imaging technology.

Infectotest^® merges a number of different technical components to form a mobile portable format diagnostics product: a test chip that concentrates the pathogen within the specimen, a homogeneous biochemical assay, a measuring module containing the imaging optoelectronics as well as software comprising a user interface and guidance, operation control, data analysis and diagnosis output. Instead of a built-in or an externally connected computer Infectotest® uses commercially available smartphones for controlling the entire diagnostic process and for cellular mobile transmission of the results.