GeneSpector today announced a collaborative agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific EMEA Ltd. (“Thermo Fisher”), a world leader in supplying life sciences solutions and services.

The timely and accurate diagnosis of disease is necessary for treatments that maximize the patients’ survival and quality of life. For this, an ever-growing number of disease-related biomarkers is monitored, usually with expensive instruments. These tests may not be accessible at routine doctor’s appointments or even in emergency situations, as samples need to be sent for testing to large centralized laboratories, adding cost and delays of several days or more and the need for repeated visits.

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, better known under the abbreviation AIDS, represents a spectrum of medical conditions caused by an infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). HIV is primarily transmitted via unprotected sex and contaminated hypodermic needles and targets white blood cells causing a gradual shutdown of host’s immune system. Such immunocompromised person is susceptible to a wide variety of secondary infections—which would otherwise pose no danger for a healthy individual—leading to the development of AIDS and, eventually, death.

Complications in pregnancy affect 5 to 10% of women and can not only threaten the life or health of the mother and her child, but also cause irreversible changes in their metabolism and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems. However, current methods can only predict them with very limited success, based on the mother’s medical history, i.e., diseases occurring in the family, ultrasound and biochemical examination. Undetected and unmanaged changes can then manifest themselves years later in the form of heart attack, stroke, intellectual disability, diabetes, or metabolic disorders, so early prediction is the key to their successful management or even prevention.

Multiple myeloma is a plasma cell disorder. It is a malignant disease caused by uncontrolled clonal proliferation of these cells in the bone marrow, leading to serious bone destruction. The disease develops in a very creeping manner and is detected at an early stage only by random examination. Major symptoms of the disease such as bone pain and pathological fractures are usually present only in later stages of the disease.

Using smart nanostructures in clinical diagnostics is a joint project between us and IQS nano. IQS nano is a company developing smart technologies which are used in diverse fields such as lighting, biomedical devices or microchips. We believe that this collaboration is a huge step towards routine point-of-care diagnostics. Smart ready-to-use devices might be used for self-examination of a patient at home and might complement and partially replace sophisticated but stressful and expensive examinations at specialized diagnostic labs.

Analysis of genetic material is one of the key tools used in routine clinical diagnostics. The first essential step of such analyses involves extraction of nucleic acids from a given source material. Commonly available kits used for this purpose are usually limited to extraction from just one or few source materials at most. Clinical laboratories and other users are consequently bound to buy several different kits, each dedicated to a narrow source type spectrum. This is not only inconvenient but also costly.