point-of-care

Time is health. Take certain blood cancers, for instance. When a patient is seen in a doctor’s office, they are then sent to a central lab for testing, and the results can take a few days. With blood cancer patients, these few days can be vital.

For years a holy grail in diagnostics has been to get diagnostic tests to the point-of-care based on just a few drops of the patient’s blood that could give immediate results.

Today we talk to Danny Levner, the co-founder of Sight Diagnostics, a company that has been working carefully and methodically toward this goal, first with a malaria test and now a CBC, or complete blood count, point-of-care test using just a couple drops of blood. The new CBC test is CE approved and commercially available in Europe and on track for FDA approval soon.

Danny says there are CBC point-of-care tests on the market in the U.S. already, but that they compromise on the quality that one gets from a central lab test.

“The physician has a question in front of him or her: Do I want the result now, or do I want it done well? And what we resolved to do in the beginning is to offer a no-compromise test,” says Danny.

This is not all that sets the company apart. From the get go, working under the ever present shadow of Theranos, Sight Diagnostics has been meticulous about doing clinical trials and publishing their data.

Danny also shares today how the technology works, combining machine vision and AI to digitize blood with an easy to use application kit for the average operator in the doctor’s office. Members of Sight’s team came from the automotive machine-vision company, Mobileye. Levner trained in George Church’s lab.

They’re working at it in methodical steps. They’re publishing their data. This time it looks like the real thing.