Resonantia Diagnostics is developing a next generation microfluidic point of care diagnostic platform that rapidly identifies, within 60 minutes, a pathogen from a clinical specimen and then determines the pathogen’s antimicrobial susceptibility within 30 additional minutes. Our identification assay leverages our patented miniature acoustic lysis system, which rapidly releases genetic material without any subsequent cleanup, allowing target DNA to be amplified by multiplex solid-phase PCR. Our susceptibility assay leverages a lateral-field excitation (LFE) acoustic sensor that conducts antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) through direct detection. Our competitive technological advantage for our identification assay is our acoustic lysis device, which processes a raw sample 97% faster (10 seconds vs five minutes for comparable extraction protocols), and liberates three times more genomic content than comparable methods (Branch et al. 2014). In initial testing of our LFE sensor, we were able to detect the impact of kanamycin on E. coli in approximately 30 minutes, 48 times faster than traditional culture-based methods. The hypothesis of the susceptibility assay suggests that antibiotics have micromechanical and electrical impacts on the physical properties of viable bacterial cells, as we and a few others have demonstrated using AFM and capacitive-based approaches (G. L. L. Alonso-Sarduy et al. 2013). By monitoring the electrical and mechanical changes on the nano-scale using our LFE sensor, the inhibitory effect of antibiotics can be measured before the bacteria replicate.
Resonantia Diagnostics was founded after FedTech’s Spring Startup Studio 2020. FedTech is an organization that pairs entrepreneurs with researchers at federally funded R&D laboratories with the aim of starting a company around a piece of technology. We founded Resonantia after determining that there is a significant need in the market for a faster, integrated identification and susceptibility profiling platform for bacterial and fungal infections. Partnering with Sandia National Labs, our molecular-based direct-detection platform reduces the time to results for AST from days to hours allowing point-of-need clinical treatment decisions.
We are currently developing and testing our 2nd Generation benchtop prototypes. We aim to have commercial prototypes of our test cartridges and reader instrument by mid-2023. We would love to connect with anyone passionate about diagnostics and deep tech!