Sittingbourne, Kent, UK, 11 April 2012-- Vivacta Limited, the medical diagnostics company with a revolutionary system for point-of-care testing, announced today that it will be presenting a poster at the Oak Ridge Conference: Emerging Technologies for 21st Century Clinical Diagnostics, taking place in San Jose, USA, on 19th-20th April 2012.
The Oak Ridge Conference is the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual forum for emerging clinical diagnostic technologies, and brings together thought leaders from industry, academia, and clinical laboratories. The conference focuses exclusively on pre-commercial technologies.
Vivacta’s piezofilm technology platform enables the development of next generation near-patient diagnostic products using a novel immunoassay system for the measurement of analytes in whole-blood. Each diagnostic test requires only a finger prick sample, providing actionable results within 10 minutes or less.
The poster describes refinements in Vivacta’s piezofilm technology platform, particularly in relation to the company’s troponin assay although the benefits apply to the system as a whole. According to the poster, novel conjugation methods for the attachment of antibodies and small molecules to carbon particles increase the binding capacity of the carbon-antibody conjugates 5-fold, giving much improved signal-to-noise. As a result, Vivacta has achieved a sensitivity of 10 pg / mL (picograms per millilitre) for its troponin I assay using a 30µL sample.
Dr Aileen McGettrick, Team Leader of the troponin programme at Vivacta presenting at the conference said: “The Oak Ridge conference is renowned for attracting leading scientists and technologists to present their latest successes across a range of cutting-edge disciplines including diagnostics. I am delighted that the organisers have accepted our poster for presentation at the meeting.”
About Vivacta
Vivacta Limited is applying its expertise in piezofilm technology to develop a range of new generation high performance point-of-care (PoC) diagnostics able to deliver quantitative readings within 10 minutes from a single pin prick of blood.
Rapid point-of-care testing avoids the delay caused by sending samples away to a remote laboratory for analysis and is essential where speed of diagnosis or frequent testing (monitoring) is medically necessary or economically desirable.
The Company’s platform technology is based on the measurement of micro-heating effects generated at the surface of a piezoelectric sensor, which can be used to monitor binding events in real time. In harnessing this piezofilm platform technology, Vivacta has developed PoC diagnostic products able to produce and present sensitive, precise and fully quantitative results, equivalent to those produced in laboratories.
Vivacta has generated an independent intellectual property position of over 15 patent families protecting the use of piezofilms in diagnostic assays. Vivacta’s investors include Albion Ventures, HBM BioVentures, IDInvest (formerly AGF), Spark Ventures and Viking.
For more information please visit www.vivacta.com
Contacts:
Vivacta
Oliver Boucher
Tel: +44 1795 419400
ob@vivacta.com
Media Enquiries
College Hill
Nicole Yost/Gemma Howe
Tel: +44 20 7866 7860
Gemma.howe@collegehill.com
