Project description
An innovative assay that ensures the safety of donor blood
Donated blood samples undergo laboratory screening for different infectious pathogens to ensure their suitability for transfusion. However, testing relies on one test for each disease, which hampers the streamlining of blood bank processes and poses a significant workload burden. To address this challenge, the EU-funded Safe-Blood project has developed a multiplex serological assay that can detect 11 bloodborne disease pathogens simultaneously. The assay is expected to assist in the collection of safe donor blood and prevent the exclusion of precious samples especially in light of the worldwide rising demand for blood donations.
Objective
In the European Union alone, 15 million blood donations are collected annually, but supply of sufficient and safe donor blood remains a continuous struggle. Blood can save lives; however, it also carries the potential to transmit life-threatening infections. Potential donors are screened using a questionnaire aimed to identify risk carriers. As risk carriers do not equal disease carriers, thousands of potential donors are excluded to prevent one single case of a transfusion-transmitted disease. Subsequently, blood donations are screened for infectious diseases in the laboratory with one test for each disease.
WAMA Diagnostics is a Swiss-founded company with the ambition to disrupt the in vitro diagnostics market with affordable and reliable tests to diagnose infectious diseases. WAMA has the expertise and technology to convert multiple tests into one single test, reducing time and money. WAMA is developing the Safe-Blood test to simultaneously screen for HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, Syphilis, HTLV and Chagas in a single test. Our preliminary cost-benefit analysis demonstrates the potential to reduce the screening costs from €70 - €250 per donor to €15 per donor.
1,400 European blood donation banks are responsible for the collection of the 15 million blood donations per year. The global blood screening market is expected to grow from €1.3 billion in 2015 with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 10.2% to €3.1 billion in 2024. The competition is offering solely monoplex tests: one test for one disease. There are currently no players on the blood screening market that use multiplex tests to screen for multiple diseases simultaneously, and the Safe-Blood test will hold a unique position in the market.
WAMA will use the SMEi phase 1 funding to assess the feasibility and commercial potential of Safe-Blood via a user involvement study, a stakeholder engagement study, and a market study to identify the best business model to be applied in the EU.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA virusesHIV
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- engineering and technologymedical engineeringmedical laboratory technologylaboratory samples analysis
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
1870 MONTHEY
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.