Medical diagnostic testing is a key component in the efficient delivery of healthcare solutions. However, the widespread use of diagnostic tests in developing nations such as India is held back because of their development for and in developed markets. Further, the test results take time to come in from a centralized lab which may be disastrous in a critical care situation.

Dhananjaya Dendukuri, PhD in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed a novel microfluidic-chip based platform to perform low-cost medical diagnostic tests with a focus on immunoassays (protein tests).

The new platform allows samples of blood, urine, saliva, or other body fluids to be loaded directly on to a plastic microfluidic chip and tested for the presence of multiple analytes in a few minutes.

“This automated testing platform consists of a fluorescence-based, portable reader and reagent-loaded microfludic chips. The miniaturized assays allow for reduction in the volumes of expensive reagents used and hence their cost,” says Dendukuri. “The low development cost of the platform coupled with the sensitivity and reliability of expensive tests will enable a large number of people to have access to health-care tests in under-developed parts of India and other countries,” he adds.

“Such an expansion of the ‘reach’ of diagnostics could have enormous long-term health-care benefits in these underserved societies and markets,” believes Suri Venkatachalam, founder and CEO, Connexios Life Sciences and  cofounder and chairman, Achira Labs.

For long, microfluidics has promised to be a solution for point-of-care diagnostics but one of the key challenges that has prevented the widespread entry of microfluidic products into the market is the lack of reliable manufacturing schemes that can transfer the technology from the lab into the market. Moreover, the development of multiple tests on a chip platform has been held back by the lack of reliable methods to efficiently and rapidly load multiple reagents on the chip.

Dendukuri along with his team has developed a technology to manufacture the microfluidic chips to circumvent the problems of loading reagent for multiplexed assays.

“Dhananjaya has innovated around microfluidics, focusing on lab-on-a-chip (LOC) for point of care in the diagnostics space which was a carryover from his doctoral dissertation at MIT. He has manufactured the LOC such that samples from multiple patients and multiple tests per patient could be done. Given that in emerging markets, such as India, this testing is not available (with a reasonable turnaround time and at a reasonable cost), it would go a long way in democratization of diagnostics,” says Rajesh Srivathsa, venture capitalist from Ojas Venture Partners, who has invested in Dendukuri’s Achira Labs in Bangalore.

“I believe that such a manufacturing technology will have wide use beyond medical diagnostic testing in areas including defense, food, and environment testing and in new areas such as tissue engineering,” says Dendukuri. He believes his testing platform would change the paradigm of centralized testing, democratizing medical diagnostics.