About Dianovo

Dianovo started with a television commercial. It was about trachoma, an eye disease and the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide. It spreads through contact and through flies. What I did not know at first is that trachoma is caused by chlamydia. The same bacterium, Chlamydia trachomatis, causes the most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the world.

Treating this infection is not the problem. Neither is testing for it. The tests work, but they do not reach the people who need them. Where a test does arrive, the result is read by eye and rarely captured digitally. Results filed on paper, or not at all, reach the systems that track disease late or incomplete. And in many settings, being seen taking a test reveals something private before anyone knows the answer, whether it is for an STI, for HIV, or for pregnancy.

None of these failures comes from the chemistry. What fails is everything around it: a molded plastic cassette, and a storage temperature limit that is hard to keep in the places tests are needed. The Lancet Commission on Diagnostics estimated in 2021 that about 47 percent of the world has little or no access to basic diagnostics. In low- and lower-middle-income countries, it found about 81 percent of people cannot get even the simplest tests in primary care, apart from those for HIV and malaria. More than two billion lateral-flow tests are made each year, and the plastic around them runs to tens of thousands of metric tons that do nothing for the result.

So we started with the format. CENTiV™ makes diagnostics on a continuous roll rather than one molded cassette at a time. That cuts most of the plastic, and much of the shipping that comes with it. The same roll carries whatever tests a program needs. A self-service option lets a person test with no one watching and no one to interact with. Every result becomes data from the first read, which makes it possible to follow a disease while it is spreading rather than count it afterward.

People go untested for different reasons in different places. In low- and middle-income countries, price and logistics decide what arrives, and a test that is cheaper and easier to transport changes what a program can afford to send. In high-income countries, the barrier is the appointment. A test with no booking and no clinical staff present is open to people who would not go to a clinic.

People still go blind from an infection we have known how to cure for decades, because neither the diagnosis nor the treatment reaches them. Others go untreated because of stigma. That is what we are here to change.

Redefining how rapid diagnostics are manufactured, transported, used, and discarded.