Epistem has high hopes for Genedrive
EPISTEM, the Manchester-based stem cell research company is beta testing its new Genedrive portable diagnostic machine ahead of a full commercial launch.
The company’s chief executive, Matthew Walls, said that the device could revolutionise the way in which diagnoses are made, leading to infections or cancers being diagnosed within minutes rather than days.
“It’s very exciting, and there’s a lot of interest in it,” he said.
Epistem has been working in the device – a small, portable molecular diagnosis machine – in the background to its other research for the past three years. Walls said that the product will probably be launched once substantial numbers of orders start to feed through.
Find out more about Epistem at The Knowledge
Genedrive works by taking a sample from a patient which is injected into a small, clear plastic cartridge.
The cartridge is then fed into the Genedrive machine and can deliver a diagnosis for all manner of bacterial or other infections within 20 minutes.
Currently, samples taken from patients are usually sent to laboratories for testing and results usually take a week to be returned. Tests are also expensive, costing upwards of £10 a time.
“This allows you to walk into a surgery, have a sample taken by a nurse and by the time you get to see your GP he could have your results.”
Walls said that it has engineered the cartridges to be cheap to produce – less than £1 each – but technologically advanced, with each one containing a RFID chip with patient details.
The cost of the drives themselves will initiallly be “in the thousands” but Walls said that he expected it to eventually drop to the hundreds as volumes increase.
“They will sell for way below what the market is used to,” he said.
“We see it as being Apple-like in terms of it being high-volume, low cost units but high-end technology.”
More details about the distribution channels for Genedrive are likely to be revealed when the company announces its interim results at the end of the month.
Its most recent full-year results to June 30, 2010, showed that the company made a pre-tax profit of £300,000 after increasing sales by 45% to £5.7m.
