Biotech startup Biological Dynamics receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance smartphone enabled point-of-care molecular diagnostic platform

Biological Dynamics, a molecular diagnostics startup with mission to improve global health outcomes, today announced a new grant award funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development of affordable smartphone enabled point-of-care diagnostic solutions for global health.

The partnership and collaboration will focus on enabling complex decision-making by combining results from point-of-care tests with smartphone data – creating essential opportunities in countries with limited access to sophisticated laboratory testing. The work will explore the feasibility of integrating wireless technologies intended to simplify field-based workflows and to reduce dependence on wired power sources into OmniVeritaM – the smartphone-enabled portable diagnostic platform being developed by Biological Dynamics. The ultimate objective of the portable is to enable affordable, user-friendly, and sensitive diagnostic testing for high-burden conditions that can be successfully deployed to resource-poor settings on a global scale.

Biological Dynamics Inc. is an early stage company that has developed a proprietary AC Electrokinetic technology to rapidly extract nanoparticles in high-conductance physiological solutions. The startup was founded in 2008 by Raj Krishnan and David Charlot, Bioengineering PHD graduates from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Its vision is to enable healthcare practitioners to detect, diagnose and monitor cancer and other diseases from a simple blood draw (or other bodily fluid) and rapidly intervene, increasing patient survivability while driving down the total burden costs.

“We are thrilled to expand our engagement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, beyond our current work in tuberculosis testing. With the sensitivity and scalability of our platform, we can empower healthcare workers by providing actionable, affordable, and timely clinical-grade diagnostic information by putting diagnostics at their fingertips,” said Raj Krishnan, Ph.D., CEO of Biological Dynamics. “We believe in the potential of this collaboration to bring much-needed real-time health decision making to underserved populations in low- and middle-income countries.”

The technology is powered by Biological Dynamics’ novel isolation platform, Verita™, which enables the isolation of circulating biomarkers such as cell-free DNA and exosomes from whole blood, serum, and plasma without the need to pre-process samples. The Company is currently applying the cutting-edge isolation capabilities of Verita™ to develop the next generation of lab and point-of-care tests for the early detection and treatment response monitoring of cancer.