HORIBA Medical, a subsidiary of Japan-based HORIBA Group, the global leader for measurement and analysis systems, has been designing, manufacturing and marketing high performance analyzers for laboratories and hospitals for over 30 years. This expertise that has made the company one of the world leaders in Hematology and a key player in the Hemostasis and Clinical Chemistry activity.
Today, patient care and treatment practices are evolving quickly. HORIBA Medical is designing solutions to anticipate patient-centered needs by developing new POCT (Point of Care Testing) systems.
In parallel, for the past six years HORIBA Medical has been working with one of the most innovative organizations in the field of new technologies, CEA-Leti, the technology research laboratory of CEA Tech, federating their respective skills in a Joint Laboratory called HEMACOUNT.
“We focused on two disruptive technologies: a microfluidic cartridge and a new, lens-free imaging device (LensFree), which will enable development of more compact, easier-to-use POCT-type devices,” says Damien Isebe, who heads up this highly innovative project at HORIBA Medical. “Twelve families of patents have been filed since the start of the project, and the latest one has been the subject of several scientific papers”.
“Flow cytometry is the main analytical technology in hematology, but it requires large and complex hardware systems. Conversely, lens-free imaging combined with a sample prepared as a microfluidic cartridge paves the way to a simple and compact disruptive architecture. This imaging technique provides a wide field of view (≈30mm²) resulting in a counting statistic (a few thousand cells) in one single acquisition consistent with required hematological performance,” explains Sophie Morales, laboratory head at CEA-Leti.
The latest publications and presentations to date: for LensFree, one publication in the Journal of Biomedical Optics and two oral presentations at ECBO (European Conferences on Biomedical Optics), held in Munich in late June 2019; and for the work on microfluidics, presentation of a scientific poster at µTAS (International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences) in Basel, Switzerland, in October 2019.
Given the success of the partnership and the work that remains to be done, HORIBA Medical is pleased to announce the continuation of this collaboration, which will allow it to draw value from this work in the form of innovative applications, to bring developments to maturity and to design products that will serve care-givers and patients.
