SBIR-STTR Award

Each year influenza causes more than hospitalizations and about deaths in the US Periodically pandemic strains of influenza emerge that cause even greater devastation the most recent HN pandemic of causing deaths in the US Diagnostic testing for influenza is a critical component in managing the disease it offers data used in global influenza surveillance efforts and can help guide the treatment of individual patients. Unfortunately the current gold standard influenza diagnostics can take days to deliver a result far beyond the two day window of opportunity for antiviral drugs to have a therapeutic effect. Faster flu tests are either not very accurate or are too expensive for low resource settings thereby limiting accessibility. This project will adapt Luminostics inexpensive smartphone enabled technology platform for rapid diagnostics called CLIP to rapidly and accurately detect influenza with an equivalent or higher accuracy and lower cost than other tests. This product CLIP Flu will accurately distinguish between influenza and other respiratory pathogens such as respiratory syncytial virus RSV. In this Phase I project Luminostics will identify optimal affinity reagents to be used in CLIP Fluoptimize the assay parameters and test the resulting assay in a retrospective clinical evaluation