Leveraging CRISPR-Cas for fast and accurate point-of-care diagnostics: SCOPE

Programme(s): HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) 

Topic(s): HORIZON-EIC-2023-TRANSITIONCHALLENGES-01 - EIC Transition Challenge: Full scale Micro-Nano-Bio devices for medical and medical research applications

Call for proposal: HORIZON-EIC-2023-TRANSITION-01

Funding Scheme: HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC Grants

Grant agreement ID: 101158803

Objective:

In the healthcare sector, rapid and precise point-of-care diagnostics is indispensable for enhancing patient outcomes, particularly in critical scenarios such as sepsis and organ transplantations. Present In Vitro Diagnostic technologies often strike a compromise between accuracy, speed, portability, and cost-effectiveness. Immunoassays offer rapidity but sacrifice accuracy, while molecular diagnostics like PCR deliver accuracy at the expense of time and ease of use. Isothermal molecular tests, on the other hand, are swift but lack specificity. Hence, a pressing need persists for point-of-care diagnostic tools that embody user-friendliness, costefficiency, high accuracy, and adaptability to diverse applications. At Scope Biosciences, a spin-off from Wageningen University, we have developed and patented a CRISPR-Cas diagnostic technology (scopeDx) that harnesses the precision of PCR and the speed of isothermal amplification, delivering rapid results within approximately 30 minutes at the point of care. Futhermore, the scopeDx platform can be rapidly adapted to new applications. Our objective is to complete the pre-clinical validation of our solution to offer userfriendliness, robustness, portability, and cost-effectiveness, providing swift results directly at the point-of-care. Besides, we aim to prove the versatility of our platform, which can be extended to the detection of various pathogenic microbes (viruses, bacteria, fungi) and genomic applications (stem-cell & tissue transplantations). In essence, scopeDx constitutes a modular platform technology with the potential to revolutionize the point-of-care diagnostics market comprehensively.