OFFER: Point of care diagnostic testing device

Applied research group at Eurecat is offering simple, portable and low-cost testing devices for COVID-19 diagnosis

As the COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly spreading, low-cost, reliable, fast and sensitive testing methods are urgently required to support the diagnostics and management of patients with the virus.

Eurecat is offering the possibility of moving current diagnostic testing for COVID-19 from the laboratory environment to an accurate and scalable point of care device. The device would have the potential to support early identification of patients with the virus, reducing the time to obtain an actionable result.

The applied research group at Eurecat, Technology Centre of Catalunya, specialise in the development and fabrication scale-up of Point of Care devices. Their technological offer includes the development of a wide range of printed sensors (physical, bio and chemo-sensors) and printed (hybrid) electronic circuits.

The group provides printing fabrication solutions from the prototyping level up to pre-industrial short series. They develop ad hoc electronic units to transduce the signal and process it, tailored to each specific application, e.g. potentiometer unit, absorbance detection unit, or image analysis mobile app.

Their point-of-care devices are typically designed in a manner that they do not require complicated machinery nor a trained professional to operate them.  This enables the POC systems to be used in different scenarios, including at-home setting by end-users.

The team has the capability to transfer several bioassay strategies into a simple, portable, and low-cost device.

The offer is aimed at groups studying biorecognition elements to detect either the presence of viral proteins (antigens) expressed by the COVID-19 virus in a sample or the presence of antibodies in the blood of people believed to have been infected.

The team’s capabilities, together with experts in the biological field, bring the opportunity to translate the conventional detection methods into point-of-care devices.