NEW YORK – Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering on Monday announced it has licensed its affinity-based, multiplexed, electrochemical sensing technology to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup StataDx.
The license to the technology, called eRapid, is exclusive and worldwide in the fields of neurological, cardiovascular, and renal diseases, the Wyss Institute said.
The institute also announced that Sanjay Sharma Timilsina and Nolan Durr, researchers at the Wyss involved with eRapid's development, have joined StataDx as scientists. The company is focused on developing tests for use in the near-patient and at-home settings.
Donald Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute, said in a statement that StataDx aims to "pioneer point-of-care diagnostics in areas that utterly lack them now, such as detection of traumatic brain injury in sports or on the battlefield." Such tests could result in "life-changing and life-saving outcomes for patients with a vast range of diseases," he said.
According to Wyss, eRapid is a low-cost, multiplexed diagnostics platform that can simultaneously detect and quantify a range of biomarkers in blood and other biological fluids. Ingber and Pawan Jolly, a senior staff scientist at the Wyss Institute, are two of StataDx's cofounders. Jolly serves as a consultant to the new company.
StataDx CEO Sidhant Jena said that the company intends to focus first on neurology, but has other indications of interest, including multiple sclerosis, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease. He said that eRapid has overcome some underlying limitations with other electrochemical biosensing technologies that will allow it to be manufactured at scale.
Wyss previously described the platform in a Nature Nanotechnology paper in 2019. In 2020, it licensed the technology to Sydney-based iQ Group Global for use in COVID-19 testing applications.