NEW YORK (360Dx) – A*STAR and its spinoff One BioMed said today that they recently launched a Singapore $9 million (US$6.6 million) lab with an aim to commercialize a point-of-care diagnostic kit within the next five years that can concurrently test for up to 20 types of infectious diseases in 20 minutes.
One BioMed is developing a portable point-of-care diagnostic system that will allow doctors and patients to avoid having to wait for days for results from samples sent to central labs for testing, A*STAR's Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and One BioMed said in a joint statement. They added that their development team has reduced costs to levels comparable to those incurred in central lab testing.
In the new lab, the test developers will conduct pilot production of an automated diagnostic kit using IME's lab-on-a-chip technology and leveraging One BioMed's silicon biophotonics and platform technologies for solid-phase nucleic acid purification developed at IME.
Within a cartridge smaller than a smartphone, the lab-on-a-chip integrates several testing steps into a single-step process.
One BioMed Founder and CEO Mi Kyoung Park said that as the firm completes the development of its first product, it is shifting activities toward commercialization. It has secured Singapore $1.75 million in funding and has invested an additional S$7.5 million in technology development
The collaborators anticipate that their new 1,500-square-foot joint lab will be fully operational by March 2019.
In May 2017, A*STAR’s Genome Institute of Singapore and One BioMed announced that they launched a joint lab to develop molecular diagnostic assays for the Asian clinical infectious disease testing market.