Closing the diagnostic gap with portable technology

Being able to diagnose disease quickly and accurately is vital in any health response. Yet almost half of the world’s population lacks access to diagnostic technology. This scarcity is costing lives today, and is only going to get worse in the future as global biosecurity threats and hazards continue to grow¹.

Health systems rely on diagnostic capabilities to support surveillance networks, detect disease outbreaks, and guide the efficient deployment of resources. The same applies in agriculture, where large-scale animal farming can act as breeding ground for infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and possible spillover events.

The gap is most pronounced in low-resource settings, particularly in low and middle-income countries, where both the infectious disease burden and AMR is highest.

Each year, more than 10 million people die from infectious diseases², and at the same time pathogens are becoming resistant to the medications used to treat illnesses. AMR has been described as a “silent pandemic” that threatens the wellbeing of billions³. These two challenges are also mutually intertwined: misdiagnosis, inappropriate prescribing, and incorrect dosing not only fail to control the spread of infectious diseases but also accelerate the development and spread of resistance.

Recognising this, the World Health Assembly in 2023 urged countries to establish national diagnostics strategies and routine data collection systems to rapidly identify disease outbreaks⁴. However, the reality is that many countries lack the resources and infrastructure to supply diagnostics where they are most needed: at the point-of-care.

Without timely and reliable diagnostic data, public health authorities risk misjudging the disease landscape, leading to delayed or misdirected responses.

Even in well-resourced settings, there remains a need for more accessible and accurate diagnostics. From GP offices to large farms and research laboratories looking to test the efficacy of newly developed vaccines, better diagnostic tools can improve patient care, speed up diagnosis, reduce the need for antibiotics, and facilitate pharmaceutical innovation.

Imperial College London researchers have been at the forefront of developing portable, accurate diagnostics that can be deployed in a wide range of settings. In 2020, Dr Jesus Rodriguez-Manzano, Professor Pantelis Georgiou, and Dr Nicolas Moser co-founded ProtonDx, a life sciences company spun-out from Imperial that focuses on point-of-care diagnostics and sample processing technologies.

One of their key innovations is Dragonfly, a point-of-care molecular diagnostic platform already on the market, and being used around the world.

It incorporates ProtonDx’s SmartLid technology, which enables nucleic acid extraction directly from samples without the need for specialised laboratory equipment. The Dragonfly platform can detect a wide range of pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, mpox viruses⁵, and malaria parasites.

A 2025 study⁶ conducted in the Gambia and Burkina Faso, published in Nature Communications, evaluated the Dragonfly system using 672 whole blood samples for malaria diagnosis. The platform delivered PCR-grade results directly from fingerprick capillary blood in under 45 minutes, processed multiple samples at simultaneously, and outperformed both expert microscopy and other existing rapid diagnostic tests. Notably, it detected 95% of asymptomatic cases.

Dragonfly can also be configured to detect respiratory viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory syncytial virus, as well as skin-tropic viruses including mpox, herpes simplex, and varicella-zoster⁵. The Dragonfly Respiratory Test Panel was even deployed by Team GB at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

More recently, ProtonDx has been awarded PACE-AMR funding to adapt Dragonfly for the diagnosis of urinary tract infections, including the identification of AMR markers.

Infectious diseases and AMR are interrelated, complex biosecurity threats that need multiple innovative approaches. To meet these threats effectively, clinicians, researchers, and health systems must have access to accurate, real-time data to keep pace with needs on the ground.