Biomagnetics, LANL collaborate to develop device for tuberculosis diagnosis

Jul 9 2010

Biomagnetics Diagnostics Corp., (PINK SHEETS:BMGP - News) a developer of revolutionary technology for diagnostic systems for HIV, hepatitis, tuberculosis and malaria detection, today announced the signing of an agreement with Los Alamos National Security, LLC where Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) scientific and engineering staffs will attempt to identify new potential human tuberculosis biomarkers and will develop a validated assay to detect human tuberculosis using a currently known biomarker to be used in combination with the waveguide-based optical biosensor platform for the detection of disease causing pathogens, developed at LANL and recently licensed to Biomagnetics Diagnostics late 2009.

“We cannot think of a stronger partner to help us develop this revolutionary technology for tuberculosis diagnosis and we are clearly pleased to be working with all of the top-flight people at Los Alamos National Security, LLC and LANL”

These collaborative research efforts are designed to speed to market a revolutionary device for human tuberculosis diagnosis. This device is based on LANL developed pathogen detection methodologies that can detect pathogens that inflict humans across the globe. Current state of the art tuberculosis detection technologies rely mainly on using DNA signatures and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or anti-body based enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent (ELISA) assays, both of which require many hours to produce results and ELISA does so with relatively low confidence because of the low specificity of the assays. The integrated optical biosensor technology that will result from this collaborative research effort may prove to substantially reduce the time and expense, and increase the sensitivity for human tuberculosis detection.

"We cannot think of a stronger partner to help us develop this revolutionary technology for tuberculosis diagnosis and we are clearly pleased to be working with all of the top-flight people at Los Alamos National Security, LLC and LANL," commented Clayton Hardman, CEO of Biomagnetics. "The traditional definitive diagnosis of tuberculosis is made by culturing Mycrobacterium tuberculosis organisms from a specimen taken from the patient, an expensive and time-consuming approach to diagnosis. Newer techniques such as the blood tests QuantiFERON-TB Gold In Tube and T-SPOT TB, significantly speed diagnosis but are still quite expensive and require highly trained personnel and specialized facilities. Our development holds the promise to produce a revolutionary device that can be used at the point of patient care by relatively untrained personnel to diagnose human tuberculosis in a matter of minutes at a cost profile that is significantly below what is likely achievable by any other currently known methodology or system. Our goal is to make this concept a reality for the medical and public health communities over the short term."