Strategic Partnership: Nectar and ALine

Barriers to Healthcare

The idea of a huge laboratory taking days, or even weeks, to return test results is becoming ever more archaic. Both patients and doctors want increased speed, precision, and accuracy when pursuing answers about health and wellbeing.

Envisioning new models of test result delivery has always required a shift away from a centralized lab, and towards the patients themselves. Compressing the diagnostic timeline necessitates co-locating the patient, the diagnostic system, and the medical professional. The advantage is not only time, but removing issues associated with obtaining and transporting the patient bio-sample.

Bringing the test closer to the patient improves patient outcomes by providing actionable results while the patient is engaged with the healthcare provider, and in our opinion:

It’s about time.

With nearly instant results, medical professionals would be able to improve patient compliance and hence healthcare outcomes. In the case of companion diagnostics, the efficacy of various treatment modalities can be quickly assessed, with further treatment modified, adapted, or abandoned in favor of a more effective treatment option.

Unfortunately, limited diagnostic capabilities in the hands of the healthcare provider creates a barrier to better healthcare.

Are Faster Lab Results Realistic?

However, moving from raw data to state of the art results has proven to be untenable in the past. It was too expensive, too unrealistic, or too inaccurate for widespread use. For hospitals that were seeking to model efficiency, accuracy, and good stewardship, faster results were simply not an option.

But what if those same hospitals had an affordable resource that enabled them to more quickly respond to patient illnesses? For example, infectious diseases like sepsis have been shown to have a 7% increase in mortality rate per hour. While you wait for results from the lab, patients are dying.

Although hospitals have on-site testing capabilities, especially when supporting an ER, there are often feasibility issues in terms of associated maintenance, calibration, and consumables. For many, the issue is often yet another SKU to manage for a specific test. After all, how many small shoebox-sized devices can you have in one lab?

Nectar Joins ALine to Change the Future of Lab Results

Thankfully, innovative organizations like ALine and Nectar are changing the future of lab results.

Founded in 1992, Nectar focuses on life-saving and impactful products with an emphasis in medicine, energy, and food. As an ISO 13485:2006 certified company, they specialize in the development of medical devices, industrial equipment, and connected devices (IoT). Founded in 2003, ALine specializes in microfluidic engineering development using a rapid Design-Build-Test Cycle platform with demonstrated commercial success for Microfluidics-based and Lab-on-a-Chip products.

Together, ALine and Nectar’s multidisciplinary teams have completed work in engineering, chemistry, physics, bioanalytical systems, materials, biology and the commercialization of products.

We’ve proven that we can tackle unknowns and bring complex scientific processes to a positive culmination, and together we’ve navigated the risks, trials, and eventual successes of providing cost-effective, patient-oriented, rapid test results.

We also take great pride in achieving milestones and providing the infrastructure, technology, consulting, and virtual assistance necessary to deliver top-tiered results that haven’t been considered accessible, or even possible, in generations past.

Now, we’re offering the first and only co-located IVD solution available.

ALine provides a system that is functional and into trials, while Nectar offers a system that gets things to manufacturing. Ultimately, our system works for customers at the end of the day.

Throughout the process, we’ve believed that the cost of goods should be in the one-time cost of the instrument, not the ongoing cost of consumables. We’ve believed that consumables and devices should inform one another, and that, as a system, they should execute a workflow.

Our combined experiences with microfluidics and cartridge and instrument design have given us the ability to build a testing system that neither one of us could have brought to fruition alone. It’s smaller, portable, less expensive, and more dynamic than any other lab testing solutions available.

This is the Future of Precision Medicine

Top-level results with accuracy and speed and improved patient care, provided at a cost that hospital administrators can accommodate within annual budgets may sound too good to be true.

In fact, you should have questions.

After all, FDA compliance is not trivial, and patient care is the most important offering hospitals have.

That’s why Nectar’s hard-earned ISO 13485:2006 certification pairs so well with ALine’s rapid microfluidic engineering platform and pilot production under ISO13485:2015 certification. The experience and capabilities of both teams to design and engineer products, paired with a foundation of design transfer experience, has allowed us to do something that no one else has been able to fully integrate at a price point that enables widespread use.

By creating a well-crafted, FDA approved testing device with affordable consumables that can deliver immediate results, we’re changing the game for patients, doctors, and hospitals at a global level by offering the only co-located IVD solution on the market.

We believe we can see the future of where precision medicine is going, including device commercialization, device/consumable workflows, minimal infrastructure, bridge manufacturing, affordable consumables, and an understanding of human factors that include how users collect samples and use the device and diagnosis.