NEW YORK – GrapheneDx, Sapphiros, and General Graphene said Tuesday that they formed a partnership for manufacturing and commercialization of GrapheneDx's five-minute tests, starting with sexually transmitted disease tests.
Boston-based GrapheneDx is developing point-of-care and home-use tests that use graphene field effect transistors and antibodies to detect targets in biological samples and deliver results in five minutes. Under the terms of the deal, Knoxville, Tennessee-based General Graphene will be GrapheneDx's preferred supplier of graphene, which will be used in Sapphiros' facility for manufacturing point-of-care and consumer-use diagnostic tests.
Sapphiros, which has an undisclosed stake in GrapheneDx, will also help commercialize the tests through its existing partners. The company said its manufacturing facility has a production capacity of 5 billion tests per year and the ability to incorporate printed electronics and printed battery technologies into low-cost single-use diagnostic tests.
"GrapheneDx is an innovator in the diagnostics space with perhaps the most disruptive diagnostics platform that we have seen," Sapphiros CEO Mark Gladwell said in a statement. "Combined with General Graphene's impressive scale and graphene expertise, Sapphiros will accelerate the industrialization and commercialization of GrapheneDx's biosensor technology."