Vivacta to Present Poster Detailing Further Refinements to its Troponin Assay

Vivacta Limited, a medical diagnostics company with a revolutionary system for point-of-care testing, has announced that it will be presenting a poster at the Oak Ridge Conference: Emerging Technologies for 21st Century Clinical Diagnostics, taking place in San Jose, USA, on 19th-20th April 2012.

The conference is the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual forum for emerging clinical diagnostic technologies and will focus exclusively on pre-commercial technologies.

Vivacta’s piezofilm technology platform exploits the piezoelectric effect by which thermal perturbations on a piezofilm surface produce an electric charge. The measuring of this electric charge across the piezofilm enables monitoring of chemical activity (or the rate of binding between antibody and analyte) in an assay. The platform enables the development of next generation near-patient diagnostic products and can provide actionable results from a finger prick sample within 10 minutes or less.

The poster to be presented describes refinements in Vivacta’s piezofilm technology platform, particularly in relation to the company’s troponin assay, although the benefits of the refinements are not restricted to this one test. According to the poster, novel conjugation methods for the attachment of antibodies and small molecules to carbon particles increase the binding capacity of the carbon-antibody conjugates 5-fold, giving much improved signal-to-noise. As a result, Vivacta has achieved a sensitivity of 10 pg / mL (picograms per millilitre) for its troponin I assay using a 30µL sample.

Dr Aileen McGettrick, Team Leader of the troponin programme at Vivacta presenting at the conference said: "The Oak Ridge conference is renowned for attracting leading scientists and technologists to present their latest successes across a range of cutting-edge disciplines including diagnostics. I am delighted that the organisers have accepted our poster for presentation at the meeting."