Regardless of the corporate claptrap, if we give Nanobiosym the benefit of the doubt and assume their geneRADAR platform does advance the state of the art in qP

Regardless of the corporate claptrap, if we give Nanobiosym the benefit of the doubt and assume their geneRADAR platform does advance the state of the art in qPCR, microfluidics, and point-of-care diagnostics, what might that advance be? It may have to do with how much blood they need for each multiplex test. Clinical qPCR diagnostics need at least 5-10 uL of blood for each test (ballpark minimum). A finger prick or dried blood sample card [1] may provide enough DNA (human or pathogen depending on the test) for one or two of these tests, but not more. To run 100 or 1000 tests in parallel, a lab would need 5-50 mL of blood. Easy to get from a venous blood draw but not easy in the field. So perhaps Nanobiosym is developing a reliable method purifying DNA from blood and running multiplex qPCR at nanoscale volumes, and possibly enriching the purified DNA first for particular pathogen DNA sequences with a non-qPCR method. The capability to run hundreds of qPCR-based diagnostic tests in parallel from a single finger prick of blood would result in significant improvements in clinical convenience and reagent cost-savings. It's an interesting challenge: in a person who is HIV positive but hasn't presented with AIDS, how many viral genomes can be expected to be found on average in a single finger prick of blood (viral titer)? It could be on average only 0.001 - 1 genome [2] [1] http://www.spotonsciences.com/dbstechnology/ http://www.spotonsciences.com/dbstechnology/ [2] "If a subject has a high HIV viral load (for example, at least 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this may indicate treatment failure, i.e. that the virus is replicating and the disease may progress more quickly. If HIV viral load is low (for example, less than 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this indicates that the anti-viral treatment regimen is effective, i.e. that the virus may not be actively replicating and the disease may progress more slowly." - http://www.google.com/patents/WO2014140641A1?cl=en http://www.google.com/patents/WO2014140641A1?cl=en