Universal Biosensors (UBI) is a medical diagnostics company focused on the R&D and manufacture of diagnostic test systems for point-of-care (POC) professionals and for home use. UBI's core technology is a disposable, multi-layer test strip, which uses its proprietary electrochemical sensor in order to rapidly and accurately measure biomarkers in the blood.

Mr Paul Wright, CEO, Universal Biosensors, speaks to BioSpectrum about their innovative technology and about how they plan to exploit the lucrative diagnostic markets.

Please tell us about the UBI's technology?
We produce, design and manufacture point-of-care devices (POCD). What we have is the capability and intellectual property (IP) portfolio to design disposable strips by electrochemical biosensors, which are read by hand-held portable readers. The strip technology that we have is low cost that we use once for diagnosis and then throw away. Traditionally, sensors of this type have used a particular style of technology with electrodes on the surface. We have done a simple change and we have our electrodes sitting opposite each other. This simple change has proven to be beneficial.

Our strips, as a result of this use small amounts of blood. Our strips are more accurate than traditional ones because they are able to get more information out of the blood sample and they are robust and low cost to manufacture. We have a simplified manufacturing system as a result of this design. So essentially we have essentially an accurate chip and small sample value system which is very important for POCD.

Our first product is used to test blood glucose to test for diabetes. Our product is essentially sold and marketed by LifeScan, a J&J company that specializes in diabetes care. They are selling the product OneTouch Verio in over 85 percent of the world blood glucose testing markets. It is still very early days and it is hard to say how it is going but what we see is that increased in sales for our products. We are one-of-the-two manufactures of strips. We make the strips here in Australia and LifeScan also manufactures the strip. For diabetes they have the rights and technology to make the strips. We use the same technology for testing things other than glucose on our own. As far as diabetes is concerned, we have partnered with LifeScan.