Diagnostics & Biotech Nanotechnology Investment

Business sees the enormous potential of expanding a simple, inexpensive testing platform like LFIA to even more personal and industrial uses by solving these traditional trade-offs and delivering diagnostic solutions with increased sensitivity and the ability to accurately quantify analytes in the home/office/field that rivals technologies that can only be performed in high complexity laboratories.
Business has proven that we can achieve this by changing the detection biolabel (quantum dots rather than colloidal gold) and standardizing the interpretation of results by changing the method from personal eyesight to inexpensive LFIA test readers that accompany LFIA's in the field and actually allow for quantitation of the analyte of interest instead of just a yes or no answer for detection.
The use of Quantum Dots (QD's) as biolabels for immunoassays like LFIA has been demonstrated by several research groups and commercialized for different diagnostic uses. Unfortunately, the widespread adoption, and expanded utilization of QD technology in lateral flow immunoassays has been limited by lack of application know-how to leverage their distinctive optical properties, respectively.
Business is uniquely positioned to address these issues and unlock the potential of QD's in the LFIA platform. QD's are semiconductor nanoparticles whose constituent electrons are restricted in motion (quantum-confined) leading to a broad absorption and narrow emission of light. Typical LFIA rely on optical contrast and that can be enhanced by using QD's instead of traditional technology. This is because under the right illumination it is possible to selectively enhance the signal of a fluorophore like QD's from its background and thereby detect extremely low concentrations of a fluorophore or a fluorophore-antibody-antigen combination. Among the various fluorophores, QD's offer an unparalleled combination of properties such as higher absorption coefficients, higher quantum efficiency and narrow emissions, resistance to blinking and photobleaching, superior environmental stability, and colour tunability. QD's can completely supplant traditional technology like colloidal gold as they offer higher specific surface area for bio-conjugation, multiplexing capability with distinct emission colours and cheaper manufacturing costs. Although colloidal gold offers better optical contrast in ambient lighting, the ability to utilize low-cost extrinsic light amplification in LFIA readers with QD's offers significant improvements over colloidal gold.