Resonantia Diagnostics

About

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.