NanoDiagnotic Technology I-Corps Training

Project Summary Exposure to organophosphate (OP) pesticides, which can cause acute or chronic poisoning, is the major environmental and occupational health problem across the world. There is a need for a simple, rapid, cost-effective, and accurate biomonitoring tool for screening/assessing personal exposure to OP pesticides. To address these issuers, NanoDiagnostic Technology, LLC (NDT) proposed to develop an integrated smartphone/nanosensor platform serving as a new biomonitoring tool for onsite, rapid, and accurate detection of personal exposure to OP pesticides just using a minimal finger-prick blood sample and won an award of NIEHS STTR phase I grant with the duration of June 1 2021 to May 31, 2022. Since starting the project, we put great efforts on the technology development and made great progress and obtained very promising results. At the same time, we actively worked on how to commercialize the technology. We need to understand the needs of the market and where the customers are for the technology. In September , 2021, the company formed a team and participated in a six-week NSF I-Corps Fall 2021 training program at the UNC Charlotte Ventureprise and conducted customer discovery through interviews. We still need more information on the commercialization of our technology. We are very excited about this opportunity offered by the NIH I-Corps Training program and eager to participate in this training program and acquire more knowledge on how to translate our technology from a lab to the marketplace and gain more information including but not limited to, further discovering customers, the need of market, strategic partners, competitors, investors, building network in the field, etc. After completing this training program, we will be able to establish our overall commercialization strategy and write a strong proposal including both the technology and commercialization plan for STTR phase II application.Narrative The researchers in small-size start-up companies like us generally lack experience in commercialization of technology. This NIH I-Corps training program offers a great opportunity to educate these researchers on how to conduct research on commercialization, which will allow researchers to efficiently accelerate the translation of their technologies from a lab to the marketplace.