1Drop Diagnostics joins hands with Massachusetts General Hospital

1Drop Diagnostics, a Switzerland- and Boston-based medical diagnostics and life sciences company, has announced that the funding of their collaboration with clinicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) on portable medical diagnostics of heart disease in primary care settings has been continued by the Consortia for Improving Medicine with Innovation & Technology (CIMIT) and the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). 1Drop Diagnostics will obtain clinical guidance, specific identification of unmet clinical needs, and the environment to perform validation studies from clinicians at MGH.

The team recognizes the pressing need in primary care for high-quality medical diagnostics of cardiovascular disease. The quick diagnosis and treatment of cardiac patients is an essential contributor to enhanced quality of care and increased survival rate. Primary care centers, however, do not usually have access to diagnostic devices that can assess cardiovascular disease rapidly and accurately.

While existing point-of-care (PoC) diagnostic devices provide results from a sample of blood, they can be slow, difficult to use and are often not accurate, precise and sensitive enough to fulfill health care professionals' requirements for disease detection. Most of the devices currently on the market require a medical assistant to draw venous blood from a venipuncture of the patient's arm. There are also cost considerations for primary care clinics that infrequently measure cardiac biomarkers. The significant upfront costs, usage costs, and maintenance costs associated with such devices can motivate users to turn to central laboratories, which they might see as less cumbersome and more practical.

1Drop Diagnostics is working with clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital to investigate a PoC device whose ease of use, high-quality results and affordability would enable its use in a wide range of primary care settings, including clinics, nursing and rehabilitation homes, and pharmacies. The device, which would use blood from a finger stick instead of a phlebotomy blood draw, would save time and costs and would allow medical professionals to make informed decisions in a single office visit.

By affordably and rapidly measuring blood biomarkers, the proposed device, comprised of a disposable diagnostic chip and reusable reader, would be capable of saving lives through better, faster medical diagnostics. This means that a personalized healthy baseline could be established and trends away from that baseline could be immediately identified. Crucially, cardiovascular disease would be identified very early and preventive actions could be taken long before serious health problems arise.