TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Diagnostics are about to change radically and forever. In front of thousands of global leaders in lab medicine at the 2023 American Association of Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo, Vital Biosciences introduced its revolutionary new product, the VitalOne. The VitalOne intends to make blood diagnostics ubiquitous by bringing more than 50 lab-grade test results that cover 95% of routine lab orders to primary care sites in the form of a simple device the size of a desktop computer. The VitalOne will allow doctors to test, diagnose, and treat patients in the course of a single visit. Patients receive their results within 20 minutes. The VitalOne is in late-stage development and is not yet available for sale. The underlying technology already has been tested and validated against thousands of samples versus gold-standard instruments with Vital’s lab partners.
Vital executives on Monday presented to an audience of thousands of lab experts at the annual meeting of the AACC and were selected as Audience Choice winners for this year’s AACC Disruptive Technology Award.
In addition to sharing news about the VitalOne, Vital announced that they have raised $48 million to date from Lachy Groom, Northpond Ventures, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, Labcorp, Inovia Capital, Route 66 Ventures, and others.
Funding will be directed toward late-stage development, verification and validation activities, and initiating clinical studies.
Vital is reimagining point-of-care testing through its development of the VitalOne to create a world where patients will not need to take additional time off from work, travel between their primary care doctor and a lab, or wait for days to discuss their results with their healthcare provider. Closing this gap will make diagnostics more accessible and accelerate clinical interventions that prevent adverse outcomes and disease progression.
The VitalOne is currently in late-stage product development, with further clinical studies planned for later this year.
“We started Vital to make high-quality care more accessible to millions of people and realized how limited we were by our current diagnostic infrastructure,” according to Vasu Nadella, CEO and Co-Founder of Vital Biosciences. “We seek to disrupt the $85 billion diagnostics industry by bringing lab-grade diagnostics everywhere and eliminating the impediments to proactive and accessible care.”
Routine lab testing has been part of clinical guidelines for decades. Today, 70% of medical decisions depend on laboratory test results. Yet up to 30% of electronic lab orders go unfilled. For example, as many as 20% of U.S. adults with diabetes do not know they have it, and 80% of individuals with prediabetes are unaware of their condition. Preventing the progression of chronic diseases such as hyperlipidemia, type 2 diabetes, or congestive heart failure is through early detection and intervention. The current process for testing, diagnosis, and treatment is simply not accessible to all patients.
“We live in a world where you can order a pizza and have it delivered in 20 minutes but your lab results take days. That’s not okay,” according to Mounir Koussa, Co-Founder and VP of Research and Development at Vital. “We want to ensure that diagnostics are available wherever and whenever they are needed, and that testing never becomes an impediment to treatment and care.”
Vital is currently exploring relationships with industry, academia, and the laboratory medicine community for further performance evaluations and feedback. “We are committed to introducing this disruptive technology in partnership with the laboratory medicine community and the FDA,” added Koussa.
How it Works
The VitalOne will be a fully automated platform that will bring a comprehensive suite of lab tests to all sites where primary care is accessed, including clinics, pharmacies, in-home care, and more. Vital’s technology aims to make healthcare radically more personalized, proactive, and accessible. With as little as 600 uL (1/8th of the volume of a teaspoon of blood), the VitalOne is being developed to quantify more than 50 of the most commonly requisitioned test results in primary care in just 20 minutes; all with performance comparable to central labs. Using advancements in microfluidics, computer vision, biochemistry, and robotics, the VitalOne is being developed to run three modalities of lab tests in parallel: hematology, clinical chemistry, and immunoassays.
The VitalOne is being designed to be simple to use, with several innovations that automate sample preparation and quality control to minimize user time, training, and risk of erroneous results. The initial planned test menus span a wide range of potential use cases across patient populations, including general wellness, elder care, women’s health, urgent care – a menu of diagnostic tests so comprehensive that it eliminates the need to send any tests to a central lab for the vast majority of primary care patients.
About Vital Biosciences
Vital is a team of scientists and engineers developing advanced diagnostic technologies. Our ecosystem of devices, software, and services aim to make healthcare radically more personalized, proactive, and accessible. For more information, please visit www.vitalbio.com.
