MIP Discovery, a leader in rationally designed detection reagents based on its proprietary nanoMIP™ technology, has today announced it has secured a significant grant of funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The innovative project will focus on the use of MIP Discovery’s animal/cell free detection reagents as an improvement over antibodies, to quickly enable low-cost, high volume diagnostic tests, for low and middle-income countries during endemic or pandemic outbreaks.
Deployment of effective diagnostic testing is key to managing disease outbreaks at the regional or global level. The challenge is being able to design a diagnostic quickly, that can also be scaled up in a short period of time for widespread use. Traditional approaches using antibodies are challenged to meet the timeline, volume or performance requirements of a pandemic. MIP Discovery and other technology partners selected by the foundation are collaborating to advance a novel roadmap for diagnostics at mass scale in response to endemic or pandemic outbreaks.
MIP Discovery’s proprietary imprinted polymer technology is able to meet the requirements both for speed and scale of novel recognition reagents. The Company is optimising processes that will be significantly faster than novel antibody production, which is fundamentally rate limited by biological processes such as cell culture. MIP Discovery aims to reduce current timelines to allow design and scale up of novel detection reagents in under 4 weeks. nanoMIP™ detection reagents can then be deployed using massively high throughput diagnostic platforms or lateral flow devices. A ‘scale out’ approach will allow MIP Discovery to tackle multiple diagnostic markers at once, whilst still achieving the volumes required for mass scale diagnostics.
Stephane Argivier, CEO, MIP Discovery, said: “COVID-19 taught the world the importance of pandemic preparedness, particularly the importance of effective deployment of diagnostic testing. We are proud to be aligned with the foundation and other partners such as Flexotronix, a Sapphiros company, in developing new approaches to delivering diagnostic disease testing on a global basis. Our proprietary nanoMIP™ technology will redefine how the world will respond to endemic and pandemic crises, whether natural or otherwise.”
“Pandemics are very much global events which require rapid global responses. This programme, driven by the foundation funding is a key step in the development of high volume, cost-effective IVD tools that provide a rapidly scalable solution to sudden demand for any infectious disease crisis, whether these are known conditions such as Ebola or emerging viruses similar to recent strains of COVID-19.” said Mike Evans, Chairman, MIP Discovery
