Molecular diagnostics without a proprietary cartridge
editorialDevices & Hardware · early attempts · hardest part: science, manufacturing, regulatory
Isothermal amplification removes the need for a thermal cycler and is widely published. Commercial point-of-care systems still bind each test to a single-vendor cartridge.
This is editorial, not a record. Registry entries are cited facts about things that exist; an opportunity is our argument about something that does not. The links to existing work are checked against the catalog — the judgment around them is ours, and you should disagree with it where you know better.
Cartridge-based platforms are the razor-and-blades pattern again: the instrument is placed cheaply and each test is a proprietary consumable, so a laboratory's test menu is set by its instrument vendor. Isothermal chemistries such as LAMP need little more than a heat block and a readout, which is exactly why the value has been moved into the cartridge.
An open cartridge or tube format with published assay recipes, a reader with documented sensitivity, and validation data per target that a clinician would accept. Sample preparation is the underrated part — extraction from real, messy samples is where open protocols usually degrade compared to a sealed commercial cartridge.
Clinics whose diagnostic menu is dictated by whichever instrument was donated, and outbreak response, where the constraint is how fast a new assay can be deployed on hardware that already exists.
Software for authoring and running protocols on Opentrons liquid-handling laboratory robots.
Unified disease ontology merging terminology from OMIM, Orphanet, DO, and other sources into a single hierarchy.
None cited. Everything above is either reasoning about market structure or a claim you should check yourself. Where we could not source a number, we left it out rather than estimating one.
Last revised 2026-08-05.