Original from: Readily
Readily Diagnostics AB, a point-of-care diagnostics company founded in 2022 and spun out of Uppsala University, has received a grant of approximately USD 970,000 (about 9 million SEK) from the Gates Foundation to develop an affordable test for the world's most common sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
The project targets three infections that cause hundreds of millions of new cases every year: chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis. In many low- and middle-income countries, people are treated on symptoms alone, because accurate testing is too slow, too costly, or unavailable. This results in missed infections, overused antibiotics, and continued transmission with risk of increased antibiotic resistance.
Readily is developing a point-of-care platform that delivers a molecular diagnostic result close to the patient, with no need for central laboratories. It builds on the same padlock-probe technology the company developed for respiratory infections, now redirected to STIs. The test will be designed to run directly on a patient sample and with a cost built for the primary care, family planning, and HIV-prevention settings where testing is hardest to reach.
The platform will also be designed to detect genetic markers of antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea, which the World Health Organization lists as an urgent resistance threat. Knowing whether an infection is resistant before treating it helps clinicians choose the right antibiotic for that patient, and protects the drugs that still work from further resistance development.
“Readily is committed to delivering accessible molecular diagnostics. A diagnosis should not depend on where you happen to live,” says Liza Löf, CEO of Readily Diagnostics. “This grant from the Gates Foundation lets us show that an accurate STI test can also be simple and affordable enough to use anywhere. That is the whole point of the technology we have built.”
The funding will support early concept and feasibility work for a point-of-care test covering chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis, including sample preparation, antimicrobial resistance detection and the development of a complete product-development roadmap. In accordance with the foundation’s global access principles, the project is designed from the outset to support an affordable and widely accessible product.
Source: Readily Diagnostics receives grant to develop an affordable STI test for low-resource settings
