Anteo Diagnostics joins forces with Canadian company to enhance lateral flow tests
Anteo Diagnostics and Sona Nanotech will collaborate on improving lateral flow tests such as home pregnancy kits.
Australian nanotechnology company Anteo Diagnostics (ASX: ADO) has announced a collaboration with Canada’s Sona Nanotech Inc to help speed the development and improve the performance of lateral flow immunoassays.
Also known as lateral flow tests, lateral flow immunoassays are paper-based devices intended to detect the presence or absence of targets in a liquid sample without the need for specialised or costly equipment.
Typically, the tests are used for medical diagnostics at point of care (POC) or in a laboratory environment, with the most well-known variant being home pregnancy kits.
Agreement terms
Under the terms of the collaboration agreement, Sona will supply its gold nanorod technology for combining with Anteo’s proprietary AnteoBind product and various biomarkers including, but not limited to, cardiac (cTnI), sepsis (CRP) and hCG.
Also known as human chorionic gonadotropin, hCG is the fertility marker used in pregnancy tests.
The companies hope to develop sets of reagents to benefit lateral flow immunoassay developers worldwide designed to reduce production process timeframes, increase test performance and promote multiplexing.
Multiplexing refers to the process where lab technicians can conduct simultaneous testing of two or more analytes on the same tissue sample, which helps to reduce sample preparation and increase work efficacy and throughput analysis.
“With this collaboration, we will use important POC targets in the fields of cardiac, sepsis and pregnancy testing to assess the improvements which can be brought to these tests,” Anteo chief executive officer Christopher Parker said.
“[We hope] the positive results we generate will encourage global developers of lateral flow tests in these, and other important testing areas, to adopt our co-developed products.”
Cheap production
Immunoassays are relatively cheap and easy to produce, in a market worth an estimated $6 billion in 2018.
More than two billion tests are manufactured every year worldwide, including more than 400 million each for malaria and HIV tests.
Anteo Diagnostics develops and commercialises products in the life sciences research, in-vitro diagnostics, energy and medical devices markets.
Last month, the company signed an agreement with China’s Shanghai GeneoDx Biotechnology to distribute AnteoBind conjugation kits throughout the country.
At midday, shares in Anteo Diagnostics were up 11.11% to $0.02.