SBIR Phase I: CoagCare: Unified POC Blood Coagulation Diagnostic Platform Using Mechanically Sensitive Test Strips

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This SBIR Phase I project will develop a new technology for accurate, portable, and inexpensive measurement of multiple blood clotting tests. Such tests include prothrombin time / international normalized ratio (PT/INR), activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT), activated clotting time (ACT), or thromboelastography (TEG) and are routinely performed on patients who suffer from conditions such as atrial fibrillation, deep vein thrombosis, or have had heart valve replacement. This affects millions of patients in the US alone for a market worth more than a billion dollars worldwide every year. However, many of the technologies currently used in the market cannot accurately or conveniently perform multiple blood clotting tests on the same system, causing clinically significant problems for patients and raising the cost and inconvenience of routinely performing these tests. The technology in this project fundamentally enables these various blood clotting tests to be performed in a single portable, test-strip system. This will potentially lead to less expensive, more accurate, and more convenient blood clot testing for medical professionals and millions of patients; improve medical care by bringing multiple blood clotting tests to a single portable device; bring much-needed innovation to a market which has relied on less accurate technologies; and foster small business and job growth in an emerging technology landscape that has the potential to address a billion dollar, worldwide market. The technology developed in this project will enable the first-of-its-kind implementation of a direct, mechanical test in a strip form, to more closely replicate the mechanical methods which fundamentally underlie all blood clotting time tests. As a mechanical measurement, the strip will measure physical properties of a finger-prick, whole blood sample to account for the confounding factors affecting point of care blood clotting tests, such as hematocrit for PT/INR measurement. As a broad-spectrum hemostasis platform technology, other significant blood coagulation tests, which are based on measurement of fluid mechanical properties of the blood sample, can be brought to the portable point of care format including activated partial (aPTT) thromboplastin time (PT/INR), activated clotting time (ACT), or thromboelastogram (TEG) testing. This Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of a second blood coagulation test (activated partial thromboplastin time), realizing a mechanical, strip-based, portable point-of-care (POC) blood coagulation platform system.