Why are you are attending Health GB 2018?
We are here to introduce our products to patients and healthcare professionals in the United Kingdom. We have enjoyed a successful four years and are now looking to present our product globally as we feel the patient population could benefit from the platform we have developed.
Which product are you featuring at Health GB?
We are here to present the TrueLab™ Real Time quantitative micro PCR system. It is a global first; we are the only company that sells a start to end product. There are many companies that sell molecular diagnostic kits, but the layout of their products differs greatly from what we are doing.
The machine can be used to diagnose a host of infectious diseases, which were selected based on their prevalence across the globe and the need for point of care testing.
Molecular diagnostics gives you the most sensitive and specific results to guide patient care. Treatment is based on these results, so they need to be as accurate as possible. As they say, genes don't lie. Right?
The idea was to break paradigms and change the way we think about molecular diagnostics testing. So far molecular diagnostics has remained the domain of the big people, big laboratories, people with a lot of money and a lot of technical man power. We wanted to break that paradigm, so we have designed a system that does not require any infrastructure. You don't have to engage multiple vendors.
As I said, it's a start to finish platform. Everything that you require, whether it's in hardware, software, consumables, reagents, even the micropipette and the micropipette tip are all packaged together so that you don't have to go anywhere else to do the assay.
What is the benefit of using this product?
The value system that it allows molecular diagnostics to be used routinely. At the moment, molecular tests are not carried out often, so they will say “Please come back after four or five days for your results”.
That’s the current turnaround time for a molecular diagnostic test result as the scientists in the laboratory must wait until they have enough patients to ensure the test is cost effective. With our platform, the scientist can do molecular testing in an hour without wasting reagents.
How does the platform work?
It looks very simplistic, but I can tell you it's very high tech. The extraction device is universal; the elute that comes out of it can be used as a starting material for any open-ended PCR. This is sold as a stand-alone product or with our chip-based micro PCR. This is, again, a global first.
The chips are disease-specific, meaning you don't have to make any probes, primers, other master makes. It's already there. You just need to load the elute onto the chip and into the florescence detector and 1 hour later you have a printable result.
Despite its size, this small device can store 20,000 patient reports. The entire OS of this is an android, so anybody who uses a smartphone can use it. You can print SMS emails from here to any part of the globe in a matter of second. It also has Bluetooth and WIFI connectivity.
The overall idea is that detect as early as you can and therefore start treatment as early as you can. This is particularly important for rural communities where the physician may not be present and the patients, who have often travelled far, need the test to be done on the same day.
The physician can receive the data and make a decision on the treatment plan moving forwards. He can also monitor the treatment to see if it is working or whether a different approach is needed such as a cocktail of drugs. Facilities are all there now to bring a more holistic approach into the way testing is done and ultimately, it's patient outcomes that we are all concerned about.
What impact will the product have on the spread of disease?
The problem with asking patients to come back for their results is that if they are from very poor, rural backgrounds, they probably won’t.
The idea is that with our platform, physicians can diagnose them on the same day and deliver the results with the treatment plan whilst the patient is still there. They don't lose them. Losing a guy with TB creates havoc. Why? Once he's positive, he spreads it to somebody else.
There are so many research papers that say each positive TB individual will spread the disease to around 25 more individuals. That’s why after years of intervention in India and billions of dollars of investment, cases of TB have not come down.
Also, with all the current methodologies that we have, whether that be microscopy or cell culture, they're grossly inadequate. They're sensitivities are about 50%, so every hundred samples you test positive, you lose 50. This is the only place where you get sensitivities as high as 99%.
Learn more at: www.molbiodiagnostics.com
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