A rapid point-of-care solution. Shrinking an eight year diagnostic wait into fifteen minutes.
Imagine feeling incredibly sick, but nobody knows why. Your body is destroying its own blood, and doctors have to guess the cause. It takes years and thousands of dollars to figure it out.
We fixed this. We engineered a simple rapid test strip. You put a drop of blood on it, and in fifteen minutes, you have your exact answer. Keep scrolling for the hardcore technical science.
Diagnosing Immune Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP) right now is basically a guessing game. There is no single, definitive test for it. Doctors are forced to employ a tedious process of exclusion, testing you for up to twenty other diseases, from lupus to leukemia, before they can even make an educated guess.
Only when every single one of those secondary tests comes back negative do they finally conclude that you have ITP. Because of this blind, elimination-based process, it takes an average of eight years and costs roughly fifteen lakhs just to get a straightforward answer. People suffer for almost a decade while their body aggressively attacks its own blood platelets, completely unaware of what is actually happening.
To understand why ITP is so notoriously difficult to diagnose, you have to understand the mechanics of the disease. ITP is characterized by two mechanistically distinct pathways of platelet destruction.
Pathway A involves IgG autoantibodies explicitly targeting your platelet glycoproteins. Your immune system essentially tags your platelets for destruction. Pathway B is driven by dysregulated CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes, your T-cells actively releasing elevated levels of specific cytokines to destroy the platelets.
Current diagnostic tools (like the lab-based MAIPA ELISA, which takes 48 hours and costs around ₹3,000 per test) only address Pathway A. As a result, approximately 30 to 45% of ITP patients who are antibody-negative yet positive for T-cell markers remain entirely undiagnosed by modern medicine.
We built a dual-phase rapid immunodiagnostic system to solve this. It is a point-of-care cassette that combines two integrated lateral-flow strips. You put a small drop of whole blood onto the shared sample port. You wait fifteen minutes. It tells you exactly what pathway is destroying your platelets.
A specialized integrated filtration layer automatically separates the red blood cells within the fiber matrix, meaning absolutely no centrifugation or lab equipment is required.
Strip A is engineered to detect platelet-specific IgG autoantibodies. The conjugate pad utilizes proprietary colloidal gold nanoparticles coupled to a targeted hybrid protein, designed to bind to the human IgG Fc region.
As the plasma flows through the nitrocellulose membrane, it crosses a multi-antigen zone. We striped custom recombinant fusions across distinct test lines to capture the specific autoantibodies responsible for Pathway A destruction.
Strip B simultaneously interrogates the T-cell pathway by detecting constitutively elevated plasma cytokines, requiring no incubation.
Using a dual-conjugate format, it deploys specialized monoclonal antibodies. The test lines are calibrated to strict clinical thresholds, acting as definitive functional markers of CD8+ cytotoxic T-cell activity.
By combining these two strips, the diagnostic cassette yields a comprehensive clinical phenotype directly at the point of care. It cleanly differentiates between antibody-dominant, T-cell-dominant, mixed-mechanism, or negative states without relying on centralized lab infrastructure.
With a target manufacturing cost of ₹60 to 80 per unit and a 24-month shelf life without refrigeration (stable at 4 to 30°C), this cassette is designed to democratize access to precise, pathway-specific ITP diagnostics globally.
Ranked #4 out of ~6,000 registrations at the IIIT Delhi BeCon Blueprint Mumbai Regional round.
Initially a solo personal project born out of personal necessity to solve a massive gap in the medical diagnostic process.