Zencurix Selected for Government-Wide Medical Device R&D Project on Practical Molecular Diagnosis for COVID-19 Self-Testing

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunseok Yoo] GenCurix, a liquid biopsy molecular diagnostics specialist company, announced on the 25th that it has been selected for the ‘2021 Pan-Government Full-Cycle Medical Device R&D Project.’

The selected R&D project is titled ‘Development and Commercialization of a Rapid One-Step Molecular Diagnostic System Based on RT-RPA (Isothermal Amplification) and CRISPR (Gene Editing) Technologies for Respiratory Virus Detection.’ Led by GenCurix, the project involves Nanobio Life, Yonsei University, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, and Korea University Guro Hospital, receiving a total of 5 billion KRW in funding from the government.

The company stated, “In pandemic situations such as the coronavirus, the need for saliva-based self-testing, which allows the general public to easily and quickly perform self-diagnosis, is becoming prominent,” adding, “We will develop an all-in-one platform that can analyze from pre-processing of self-collected specimen samples to signal detection in one step using isothermal amplification and gene editing technologies.”

The detection platform will be developed into a product form usable not only at airports and clinics but also in ordinary households. The plan is to produce test results within 30 minutes from specimen collection while achieving accuracy comparable to existing molecular diagnostic PCR tests.

Currently, PCR testing is the standard for infectious disease diagnosis, but it requires skilled users and expensive equipment, and analysis takes about 4 to 5 hours, making it unsuitable for self-diagnosis. In contrast, isothermal amplification technology can amplify nucleic acids to a level similar to PCR within 20 minutes without complex temperature changes, making it suitable for self-diagnosis.

Although false positives may occur during the isothermal amplification process, GenCurix plans to resolve these false positive issues and maximize sensitivity using gene editing technology. Gene editing technology, which can precisely edit specific regions of desired genes, is actively researched not only in gene editing but also in molecular diagnostics and is recognized as a global innovative technology.

A GenCurix representative said, “Being selected for this development project is a recognition of the company’s outstanding technological capabilities not only in cancer diagnosis but also across molecular diagnostics,” adding, “Although it is a field with high technical entry barriers, the originality, excellence, and commercial value of our technology were highly evaluated.”

They continued, “This technology can be expanded into a platform capable of detecting various infectious disease viruses, including the coronavirus,” emphasizing, “We will further devote ourselves to research and development to secure an innovative infectious disease diagnostic product portfolio as well as cancer diagnosis.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.