OcuSense Technology
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 The TearLab™ Platform |
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The TearLab™ Platform
The OcuSense core technology is rooted in nanofluidics and
electrochemical detection. The Company owns or has exclusively
licensed numerous issued and pending patent applications that
broadly cover an integrated system of tear collection and
biomarker analysis. The Company's TearLab platform addresses
the critical technical and economic challenges to
commercializing a point-of-care tear testing system ideally
suited for the clinical marketplace.
Conventional tear
testing technologies are very complex, expensive, and not waived
under the U.S. clinical laboratory regulations (CLIA),
factors that have relegated their use to
research and reference laboratory settings. Moreover, these
systems require that significant tear volumes be collected
from patients for analysis, resulting in reflex tearing and
diagnostic variability.
Considering that TearLab
requires only nanoliters of tear film, sampling time is reduced
to less than a second and the risk of reflex tearing is
greatly mitigated. At the core of the TearLab system is a
disposable lab-on-a-chip that functions as both a tear collection
device and a measurement system. Consequently, tears are
collected directly from the eye, eliminating the need for a
standard glass capillary tube, and embedded nanofluidic channels
move the tear sample to the measuring electrodes.
This patented tear collection interface effectively addresses the
potential adverse effects of sample evaporation and also
establishes a very simple user interface. A desktop instrument
converts the electrical signals generated from the lab card
into a quantitative measurement and displays it to the user.
This entire workflow, from sample to result, requires less than two
minutes.
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