News: Press Releases

PointCare Technologies Announces the PointCare NOW, Bringing HIV/AIDS Diagnostics to the People

June 01, 2008

 
Marlborough Massachusetts: June 1, 2008: PointCare Technologies, one of America’s leading companies in the worldwide effort to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, has developed a compact, robust, automated and portable diagnostics instrument platform called the PointCare NOW.  
 
This innovative platform delivers high performance clinical results with a DualZone technology to monitor individuals living with HIV.  The ImmuZone provides both CD4 absolute and CD4 % values. The HemaZone provides a comprehensive hematology profiling within 8 minutes.  Besides offering CD4 T-cell status from infancy to adulthood, it also deals with anemia and various abnormal white cell differentials conditions simultaneously.  These additional features are desirable with HIV disease as co-infection with other viruses and bacteria is frequent. 
 
This type of comprehensive diagnostic platform is a first in the clinical flow cytometry industry.  It is a fully automated sample handling design including a completely closed specimen processing. This system was designed with a broad base application platform concept that includes future expansion capacity. It is optimally suited at locations where skilled labor and dependable infrastructure such as electric power is unavailable. The integration of heat-stable reagents eliminates one of the most frequent and expensive hidden costs associated with CD4 T-cell counting, the customary cold chain shipping requirements.  PointCare NOW is an ideal diagnostic platform for remote rural locations
 
Monitoring CD4 T-cell numbers at regular intervals is key to following the immune status of individuals living with HIV. Examining available CD4 T-cells, also known as T-helper cells, in fresh whole blood is essential for staging life saving anti-retroviral therapy (ART).  When a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs are taken daily, they can dramatically slow down disease progression in adults and can arrest the disease in infants. Therefore frequent monitoring of CD4 T-cells either as absolute count or as lymphocyte percentage is essential part of treatment respectively for adults and children. Diligent monitoring of patent’s immune status at point of care intervention has positive reinforcement on drug compliance. It is well known that drug resistance develops rapidly in patients who are inconsistent with the meticulous administration of ART.
 
Up until recently, adequate HIV disease monitoring and treatment required laboratories with costly infrastructure and instrumentation. Well-trained laboratory personnel were essential to deal with CD4 immunophenotyping data acquisition and with waste management of open sources of biohazards imposed by conventional specimen processing technology. Therefore only major urban centers could offer such sophisticated health care services. However, the majority of HIV infected individuals, in places such as sub-Sahara Africa, live in poverty stricken rural environment. Only a few, who are strong enough, walk the many miles for a blood test.  Most rural patients cannot reach urban health care centers. PointCare was formed to address this unfortunate reality, and brings the diagnostics to the people.
 
Dr. W. Peter Hansen, Chief Science Officer of PointCare, explains: “With the PointCare NOW, we have effectively condensed a roomful of complex equipment into something that’s 12 inches high and 9 inches wide (30.5 cm high and 22.9 cm wide), weighs 25 lbs (11.34 kg) and is completely portable.  You can take it out to rural field clinics, where most of the patients live, and easily set it up within minutes. You just clip the PointCare NOW to the 24-volt battery and start running tests.  That’s about it!” He continues: “There’s no biohazard because the person taking the blood test never opens the sealed tube. In approximately 8 minutes, the practitioner can properly assess the patient’s immune status,  monitor the patient’s results and provide immediate treatment.”
 
Dr. Petra Krauledat, President and CEO of PointCare, adds: “That’s the beauty of the PointCare NOW.  This self-contained unit is robust and portable. It goes anywhere, and runs on alternate types of power. It provides practitioners with the diagnostic tools they need to deliver appropriate treatment to HIV patients.”  “The PointCare NOW really does bring diagnostics to people, no matter where they live. We’ve learned that simple-to-use diagnostics can make the difference!”
 
Background to the Development of PointCare NOW
Of the close to 40 million people who are infected with the HIV virus; 2.5 million of these are children. In the past two decades, 15.2 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. The need for more practical diagnostic technology and more effective treatment is obvious.
 
In 2002, Dr. Petra Krauledat, CEO of PointCare, and Dr. W. Peter Hansen, Chief Science Officer of PointCare, were asked by colleagues active in the worldwide anti-AIDS effort to investigate conditions in resource poor countries and come up with a more affordable way to provide CD4 T-cell testing.
 
Dr. Hansen recalls: “We spent months traveling in Africa where we discovered it wasn’t enough to merely lower the cost of the diagnostic solutions that are commonly used in industrialized nations.  In fact, we saw many donated flow cytometers – the high tech equipment used in top-notch medical centers – sitting in rural locations unused under dust covers. Why? Because this equipment couldn’t be used in these resource-limited environments. Rural practitioners needed easy-to-use diagnostic solutions that could be operated without the luxury of reliable electricity.”
 
According to Dr. Krauledat: “The challenge was clear: we had to develop a diagnostic instrument that was robust and portable, that could operate on battery power and that could easily be used by health care workers in the field, and our test reagents needed to remain stable without refrigeration.  We needed a diagnostic instrument that could deliver critically important and reliable results in minutes.”
 
Back in the United States, Drs. Krauledat and Hansen began to use their considerable skills in viral diagnostics as inventors and entrepreneurs to solve the challenging problems they saw in the resource limited world. They founded PointCare Technologies in 2002 and immediately assembled a multi-disciplinary team of mechanical, electrical and chemical engineers.  They added chemists, biochemists, two physicists and a mathematician who worked with a number of software engineers to transform the previously standard manual-evaluation technology into a completely automated process.
 
Dr. Hansen detailed some of the specific problems they had to address:  “Blood-to-blood transmission is the easiest way to spread HIV. Blood is drawn into a blood collecting tube that is sealed with a rubber cap. In resource rich countries the blood sample tube is uncapped in a sterile biohazard hood for further processing.  This strategy is impractical in the field, so we had to find a new way to protect the field healthcare worker, keeping the whole process biohazard safe and simple. We started with a normal blood collection tube for phlebotomy. We made it possible to put the tube containing the blood directly into the instrument – without taking the cap off -. The entire system is closed and self-contained, there’s no biohazard through the entire process.” 
 
The next major challenge was to eliminate the dependency on electric power. Traditional clinical instrumentation can cost more than $250,000 and they require large electrical consumption to feed one or more powerful lasers with air conditioning. The PointCare team applied leading-edge innovation to replace the traditional large laser technology based instruments with light-emitting diode (LED) system, similar to the light source available in disposable flashlights. This novel approach has greatly reduced the electrical power requirements. 
 
PointCare also developed reagents that work without refrigeration during storage and shipping.  The PointCare NOW technology was developed with a high number of internal controls to continuously assess the performance of all critical modules. PointCare NOW has undergone extensive field testing since 2007, and was launched in February 2008 with a list price of $24,500.
 
PointCare Technologies Inc.
PointCare Technologies is one of America’s leading companies in the worldwide effort to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS. This privately held, FDA-registered, ISO-certified medical diagnostics company invents, develops, manufactures and markets medical diagnostic products. PointCare brings diagnostic capabilities to resource-limited urban and rural regions, enabling immediate identification and treatment of infectious diseases by healthcare professionals. 
The company’s mission is to provide better diagnostic care to disadvantaged populations worldwide. PointCare collaborates with clinicians, scientists, engineers and other thought-leaders around the globe, and its strategic partners include some of the world’s most advanced clinical and diagnostics companies. For more information, you are warmly invited to visit www.pointcare.net
 
Media Contacts:
 
Kim Beer, Director of Marketing
Tel: 508-281-6926 x 26
 
Bobby Feigler, Vice President Worldwide Sales & Marketing
Tel: 508-281-6926 x 10
 
PointCare Technologies
181 Cedar Hill Street
Marlborough, MA 01752