To diagnose the cardiovascular disease, biomarker-based cardiovascular disease test has normally taken by large medical equipment using ELISA (Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) in hospitals or a strip-type diagnostic kit.
However, the result obtained from strip-type diagnostic kit shows low reliability and small, medium-sized hospitals or healthcare centres most visited by patients do not have automatic immunological diagnostic device that accurately detect cardiovascular disease biomarkers in the early stage.
A Korean R&D institute focusing on ICT Bio-healthcare has developed automatic biomarker analysis technology that diagnoses cardiovascular disease simply and accurately as a Point-of-Care.
An automatic analysis device with the technology is microwave-sized, smaller than existing devices. It also takes less than 15 minutes to analyse 5 different biomarkers simultaneously including pre-treatment process of sample and shows high accuracy level of results.
The technology invokes the principle that a high-density antibody fixed to the surface of the biochip catches the biomarker in the blood plasma and detects the biomarker as light in specific wavelength, and consists of three specific technologies as below.
1) Signal amplification technology: amplifies the signal, helping in observing light signals generated from antigen-antibody reaction in order to increase the reliability of detecting biomarkers.
2) High-density antibody fixation technology: enables low-concentration protein which is not easily observed to be detected.
3) Rotational motion-based automation technology: minimises the distances among centrifugation, blood sample and mixing for the pre-treatment process.
On-site Point-of-Care test device using this technology can not only screen patients with cardiovascular disease easily but predict prospective cardiovascular disease. Thus, it is expected to be used for cardiovascular disease as well as chronic disease and obesity, resulting in improving medical services.
The Korean R&D institute is looking for companies or research institutes engaged in medical diagnostic device can be the main partners to improve their products under technical agreement. Also, this institute is interested in applying joint R&D programme(e.g. EUREKA, EUROSTARS) to develop point-of-care medical devices for diagnostics of cancer, virus, and food poisoning under research cooperation agreement.
