Xagenic: PCR-free diagnosis

PCR-based diagnosis of infections can delay treatment decisions by days or hours because the method relies on technical expertise and equipment not available in most point-of-care settings. Xagenic Inc.'s chip-based arrays use a non-PCR, electrochemical approach to diagnose bacterial infections at the point of care in 20 minutes with PCR-like accuracy.

Xagenic's core technology is a silicon chip containing an array of gold microelectrodes electroplated with three-dimensional nanostructures of gold or palladium. Each electrode carries a probe that is complementary to a single bacterial nucleic acid sequence (DNA or RNA), and each chip can detect at least 100 different gene targets...