directEsense: Revolutionizing Animal Diagnostic Testing at the Point-of-Care

The Problem

Rapid and accurate identification of disease biomarkers and pathogens is crucial for successfully treating diseases in livestock and pets. Recent technological advances have opened new opportunities for diagnostic testing at the point-of-care (POC). However, these have not been fully realized in animal health testing where centralized laboratories with often poor accessibility, slow turnaround times, and high costs are the normality.

Most diagnostic technologies rely on the generation and detection of a “label” through an enzymatic or other type of reaction, usually in a multi-step process. This indirect detection significantly contributes to the complexity, labor, and overall costs of commonly performed assays. In recent years, “label-free” sensing technologies have been developed based, for example, on optical sensors or biosensors, but they still require complex assay designs that are difficult to translate into POC settings.

Our Solution

directEsense is a novel diagnostic technology that leverages our strong expertise in the engineering and fabrication of electrochemical sensors and diagnostic devices to eliminate the need for any detection labels while reducing complexity in the design of diagnostic devices, opening a broad range of opportunities. In a simple process, an “electrically active” chemical layer is applied to the sensor surface that allows the “direct” detection of target analytes. This novel sensor surface modification offers two major advantages to electrochemical sensing:

1. It improves electrical conductivity so that bound biomarker molecules can induce detectable changes in charge at the sensor surface.
2. It stabilizes capture agents, such as, for example, antibodies for disease-related antigens at the sensor surface.

This eliminates the need for several assay steps and components, including enzymatic reaction labels, as well as sample preparation steps that are used in other, more complicated label-free sensing approaches developed elsewhere.

Product Journey

Over years of an intense research and development process, a team headed by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber and former Senior Scientist Pawan Jolly developed eRapid as a multiplexed electrochemical detection platform. Expanding on this experience more recently, Jolly, directEsense co-lead Nandhinee Radha, and researchers Rohini Singh and Jeong-Chan Lee started to explore whether their newly created directEsense approach to electrochemical sensing could address pressing diagnostic needs in animal healthcare. The scientists were soon joined by Wyss Business Development manager Alexander Li in their commercialization efforts. Validating directEsense in the animal healthcare market, where there are fewer regulatory restrictions, has set the team on an efficient product development path.

Impact

Based on its outsized potential for innovating diagnostic capabilities in animal health, the directEsense project was named a 2023 Wyss Institute Validation Project and received additional technical and business development support reserved for high-priority projects at the Institute.

First focusing on companion animals, the team is initially validating directEsense to detect specific blood serum proteins that are elevated in injuries of muscular-skeletal soft tissues and inflammation caused by infections. It is estimated that the global veterinary POC diagnostic market amounts to about $7 billion annually with multiple unmet needs to be urgently addressed. Longer-term, the validation of directEsense for animal health diagnostic applications can provide an excellent stepping-stone to tackle diagnostic problems in environmental and human health at the POC.