CEO Nick Traggis is working to scale manufacturing as the healthcare market demands faster point-of-care diagnostics.
Traggis started working with LightDeck Diagnostics founder Chris Myatt at a previous endeavor, Precision Photonics, a Boulder-based manufacturer of laser optics, in the early 2000s.
Originally named MBio Diagnostics, LightDeck began as a “skunkworks effort” inside Precision.
“I ended up taking over the reins there at Precision Photonics around the time Chris started focusing on the core IP that became LightDeck Diagnostics,” says Traggis. “We ended up selling Precision Photonics in 2012 and spinning LightDeck into a formal entity at that time.”
After serving as the chief technology officer of IDEX, the company that acquired Precision, and consulting for a stint, Traggis reunited with Myatt at LightDeck in 2017 and took over as CEO in July 2021.
LightDeck’s photonics-based technology accelerates diagnostic tests and ultimately reduces costs. “It’s really this laser-based illumination where we’re using what’s called waveguide technology,” says Traggis. “That waveguide technology allows us to illuminate the sample in a manner that is less sensitive to the typical junk that might float around in somebody’s blood. We’re able to illuminate the sample faster without the additional process steps that are typically required.”
Preceding point-of-care diagnostic systems have had trouble balancing accuracy and cost. “The trick is to meet the performance requirements of your central laboratory testing while still having the affordability and cost structure that makes sense to move to the point of care,” says Traggis. “That’s not a trivial challenge to solve. We think we have a platform that can do exactly that, but you see how long we’ve been working on it. It takes some time to get that to the point where we can truly offer a point-of-care test without compromise.”
After launching in the veterinary market with Heska and water quality with Hach, LightDeck’s products are in clinical trials for use in human patients, starting with COVID-19. “We’re in clinical trials right now for our COVID products, which will be the first human products that we launch,” says Traggis. “We expect to launch them at the beginning of next year [2022]. The big benefit we are bringing with those is our speed to test results. We’ll have the fastest COVID antigen test and antibody test on the market.”