Portable and versatile Point-of-care diagnostics

Expected Outcome:This topic aims at supporting activities that are enabling or contributing to one or several expected impacts of destination “Maintaining an innovative, sustainable, and competitive EU health industry”. To that end, proposals under this topic should aim to deliver results that are directed at, tailored towards and contributing to all the following expected outcomes:Healthcare professionals dispose of diagnostic tools at the point of care that accelerate therapeutic decision making.Patients benefit from fast and accurate diagnosis leading to improved health outcomes.Thanks to more efficient diagnosis, health systems will get better evidence for disease control and prevention strategies. Scope:Point-of-Care (PoC) medical testing has made great technical progress (e.g. improved extraction, microfluidics, miniaturisation, and data processing techniques) with PoC test accuracies nearly matching those of lab-based tests. PoC tests may thus be an alternative to laboratory testing methods, enabling faster diagnostic results and therapeutic decision making. However, PoC testing is not always achieving a completely accurate diagnosis and one of the major issues with PoC diagnostics is the occurrence of false results during testing, another one is the often-cumbersome sample preparation. Hence there is a need for PoC diagnostics that are more sensitive, selective and easy-to-use allowing for improved clinical practice.The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined a set of criteria for PoC diagnostics in primary care which, in the advent of digital technologies, has been completed with two additional features and is represented by the acronym REASSURED: Real-time connectivity, Ease of specimen collection and environmental friendliness, Affordable, Sensitive, Specific, User-friendly, Rapid and robust, Equipment-free (or equipment-modest) and Deliverable to end users. To these criteria adds the feature of “sample-to-answer” (sometimes also called “sample-to-res