PARCIVAL · Partner Network for a Clinically Validated Multi-Analyte Lab-on-a-Chip Platform

The objective of PARCIVAL is to develop an integrated and automated multi-analyte lab-on-a-disk platform for the fast and reliable sample in -> answer out diagnosis of highly infectious respiratory pathogens, resistance patterns and biomarkers for individual severity of the infection. The platform format will be based on completely integrated microfluidic foil-disposables. The disposables will feature different panels (selection of pathogens, resistance patterns, biomarkers), which can be freely selected and combined to allow a comprehensive choice of diagnostic parameters by the clinician at the point-of-care, vastly increasing the access to diagnostic information for doctors in everyday situations and emergencies. The integrated platform with pre-packaged liquid and dry reagents will automate all processing steps from sample preparation, over assay processing up to result reporting.This will allow evidence-based therapeutic decisions, allow antibiotic prescriptions which are tailored to the individual patient and thus offer the prospect to greatly improve therapeutic outcomes. Also, an air-sampling add-on module for monitoring of clinical ventilation systems will be developed and interfaced to the platform. By acting as early warning system that is able to identify airborne pathogens including resistances, this will increase the impact towards the topic 2.3.1-4 (“retard the development of multi-drug resistance”) as well as the area 2.3.1 (“development of effective infection prevention and control strategies”).The consortium consists of 9 partners (6 enterprises (4 SMEs), 3 institutes). The project is heavily based on the research capabilities of innovative SMEs. Therefore, SMEs will be the main beneficiaries of exploitation in the project. The key-developments of involved European SMEs will support European companies to establish a leading role in the field lab-on-a-chip applications which is based on the huge in vitro diagnostics market.