Taiwan’s startup MobioSense team up with Kaohsiung Medical University, developed Taiwan’s first “COVID-19 Isothermal Nucleic Acid Diagnostic Kit.” It can tremendously increase the testing speed

With the strong Covid-19 testing need from the US, MobioSense is actively cooperating with US health-related institutions like Harvard Medical School, Healthcare Transformation Lab and the University of Florida, hoping to accelerate the pace to go to the US market. MobioSense Covid-19 testing kits expect to do the clinical trial with the University of Florida this year.

The most popular Covid-19 testing method for people now is using the real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) technique, also known as quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR), which detects the amplification of a targeted DNA to test the virus concentration.

This traditional testing method needs to take one and a half hours per person to check the result, and it is hard to meet the testing demand given the rapidly-increased positive cases. Moreover, most of the qPCR methods can not detect the new Covid-19 variant.

MobioSense’s testing kits is based on isothermal nucleic acid amplification technique that can reduce the testing time to 20 mintues per person, five times faster compared to traditional qPCR method. And it is also compatiable with the current qPCR testing machine, making it so the hospital and laboratory can easily adopt MobioSense’s diagnostic kit.