Country: Netherlands
What infection type does your test focus on? Urinary Tract Infection, Prosthetic Joint Infections
What does your test detect? Pathogen(s), Host Response
About the Team:
Current diagnostics methods are far from adequate to manage antimicrobial resistance (AMR) effectively. Many innovations are underway in an attempt to solve current shortcomings. Unfortunately, these are mainly incremental innovations, inadequate to make the use of antibiotics sustainable.
BiosparQ’s DigiTOF® technology shifts the paradigm of microbial diagnostics. The concept of DigiTOF® technology is to analyze bacterial cells individually, direct from patient samples. We use MALDI TOF mass spectrometry (MS) in which bacterial cells are introduced one by one, without any enrichment step. This unique approach opens point-of-care application of MALDI TOF MS and allows extraction of clinically relevant phenotypical information from bacterial cells and the human immune system response in less than 30 minutes. BiosparQ’s DigiTOF® technology distinguishes between infection, colonization and contamination, thus providing local healthcare with rapid, cost effective, personalized, on-site solutions for better patient care while serving global healthcare by conserving antibiotics for future generations.
BiosparQ was initially developed to detect biological warfare agents in less than 30 seconds. In 2012, its focus shifted from military towards medical application. Currently 3 Beta prototypes are under development which are planned to undergo clinical testing in 2018 aimed at diagnostics of urinary tract infections. To date, mixed infections, colonization and contamination severely hamper effective diagnostics of this high prevalence infection. Knowledge of modern physics, microfluidics, electronics, ICT, biotechnology and how to integrate this in one single platform are among the key competence of the BiosparQ team, headcount 7 currently. An international network of experts assists the company to realize its ambition to help reduce AMR.
