TearLab Corporation

The TearLab™ Platform

TearLab Corporation's 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 Osmolarity System  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 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  TearLab  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.