What is the problem/issue being addressed?
More than 83 M European citizens are already affected by ocular diseases. Since the incidence of many of these conditions dramatically increases with age, the overall prevalence of these conditions is bound to steadily increase in Europe and elsewhere. The overall burden of Dry Eye Disease (DED) alone has been estimated at $55.4 B respectively for the United States and is bound to grow as the population ages. DED is among the most inimical of ocular diseases in terms of indirect costs in the EU, resulting in tens of billions of euros per year lost in productivity. Eye infections concern millions of EU citizens every year, also resulting in billions of euros in direct and indirect costs. In fact, the economic and societal burdens of eye disease now reach 70% of that of cancer.
Why is it important for society?
Today’s practice in ophthalmology is limited to a visual control of general symptoms associated to a statistical prediction that can be quite difficult to interpret as the illustration on the right depicts. The aetiologia of the infection is not known and the treatments are provided empirically depending on practitioner’s skills or beliefs. As an example, Betadine is a known specific treatment that gives good results to shorten Adenoviral infections. However, 70% of practitioners in the US still do not use it, mainly because they don’t know when to use appropriate treatment even if it could save weeks of productive days for their patient and limit epidemic episodes drastically. In the same way, 40% of ocular antibiotics are prescribed when unnecessary. Besides toxic effects for the patients which can lead to allergic reactions or even complications as DED, this unnecessary prescription of antibiotics also speed up the antibiotic resistance of the strains in a threatening way.
Regarding DED, the puzzle is even worse as there is today no clear diagnosis procedure to solve the chronic pain of this disease. This lack of biomarker-based methodology leads the patient to go through a lengthy and costly “trial and error” approach to find the appropriate treatment. This also makes the development of pharmaceutical solutions more difficult, as the recruitment of homogeneous population is difficult, and the monitoring of drugs effect depends on highly qualitative rather than quantitative appreciations. With the quantification of up to 30 Biomarkers of inflammation, BIOCUDET will finally provide a clear image of the inflammation of the patient conjunctiva and as a result allow appropriate prescription as well as quantified measurement of the treatment’s efficiency.
What are the overall objectives?
The main objective of our project is thus to develop and validate the commercial prototype of the first generic, affordable, ultrafast, multiplex, easy-to-use nucleic acid-based detection PoCT dedicated to ocular disease biomarker measurement. This platform will be used with its first set of dedicated kits by non-specialist practitioners who will be able to perform a simultaneous test on more than 30 biomarkers in less than 10 min at the start of the patient’s visit or in the emergency ward. The BIOCUDET PoCT will be based on FASTGENE technology. To adapt it to ocular diseases, we will interface it with an already marketed and recognised ocular sampling device (EYEPRIM technology) to deliver a new “sample in – answer out” device focused on the diagnosis and monitoring of ocular diseases.
