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 becomes data. And almost everywhere, being seen taking a test reveals something private before anyone knows the answer, whether it is for an STI, for HIV, or for pregnancy.

What fails is everything around the chemistry: a molded plastic cassette and a cold chain the test has to survive. About 47 percent of the world has little or no access to diagnostics. In low- and lower-middle-income countries about 81 percent of people cannot get even the simplest tests in primary care. 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 removes the plastic and the logistics that come with it. Chemistry built to hold at ambient temperature removes the cold chain. One reader runs the whole menu. 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 still go blind from an infection we have known how to cure for decades, simply because the test cannot reach 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.