CUBRC is actively involved in and is supporting several different approaches to the development of clinical medical diagnostic tools, in collaboration with our commercial biotechnology partners. One of these is a device-based system, developed by Akonni BioSystems, which relies on a sophisticated combination of state-of-the art micro-fluidics and leading edge micro-array technology and designed to detect and identify a range of pathogenic micro-organisms of great importance to global public health.
 
Also, through our TriBioMed initiative we are working on the application of bioconformatics, pioneered by Prosetta Corporation, to the understanding and identification of new disease markers which will form the basis of novel diagnostic tests for a wide variety of diseases.
 
In addition in we are pursuing recent discoveries by Prosetta about the true nature of viral capsid formation to create a ‘pre-identification characterization’ tool, based on a library of structural information acquired by an analysis of the process by which different ‘families’ of viruses build their capsids. This is a unique approach to addressing the identification of unknown, emergent or genetically engineered viruses much more rapidly than previously possible.