Kephera Diagnostics, LLC
Kephera Diagnostics is a startup that aims to address the public health challenges of global infectious diseases with point of care assay technology. We collaborate with a global community of researchers to develop and translate new technologies into accessible products for clinical diagnostics and research applications. Kephera has recently been funded for development of new tests for several infectious diseases of global significance.
Company details
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- Business Type:
- Technology
- Industry Type:
- Medical Equipment
- Market Focus:
- Globally (various continents)
Mission
Our mission is to promote more effective and more affordable medical treatment through faster, point-of-care diagnosis.
Kephera’s goal is to accelerate the development of rapid, point-of-care tests for emerging infectious diseases to provide the critical diagnostic tools for medical and public health response in real-time, when and where they are most urgently needed. We combine innovative technologies in molecular biology, immunology, chemistry and device engineering to develop novel diagnostics for this purpose.
Focus
Emerging infectious diseases are responsible for over one billion cases of illness every year and continue to be the leading cause of death worldwide. Vector-borne diseases in particular, including malaria, dengue, Chagas, leishmania and others are major public health problems with over half of the world’s population at risk according to the World Health Organization. Collectively, these diseases account for an annual global economic burden in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Fast and accurate diagnosis is the key to effective treatment for infectious diseases and to epidemiological monitoring on which intervention programs depend. Diagnosis has traditionally relied on sophisticated laboratory tests, however, which are costly, complex, slow to develop, and not widely available. The unpredictability and speed with which many new infectious diseases emerge and spread makes the traditional approach unworkable – a recent example being the invasion of Zika virus in the western hemisphere in 2015. Consequently, there is a critical need for the rapid development of diagnostics in accessible point-of-care formats that can timely and effectively address the global threat of emerging infectious diseases.