The point of care testing of patient blood usually utilizes costly antibodies, nanofabrication facilities to develop nanoscopic features to miniaturize detection tests and long term clinical testing of the devices for precision, sensitivity and specificity. Also, the antibodies used in those devices are often developed using an animal host (using hybridoma technology) risking the reproducibility of the test between antibodies produced in different hosts. Devising a simple, easy to use, portable, fast, affordable and portable device would not only aid oncologists but also variety of associated specialists such as nurses, care-takers, drug screening companies and even diagnostic laboratories. Female cancers (breast, ovarian, endometrial, cervical) with poor prognostic outcome or chemoresistance shown to correlate with high serum hyaluronan (HA) levels. Especially the molecular weight of the circulating HA reported to be associated with the metastatic potential of those cancers. Building a paper based, high sensitivity HA sensing platform could be a fast, non-invasive and accurate strategy. However, sensing HA has its own challenges. Due to repeating non-specific molecular structure common antibodies do not work to recognize HA.

In Hyaluropsy we built a syringe filter device with our proprietary HA binding filter membranes to draw soluble HA in cancer patient serum samples. The filter device will be used to extract the trapped HA from the syringe filter without transferring the membrane providing speed, ease of use, affordability and portability. Currently, there is no such product exist in the market to filter HA in solutions. For instance, bacterially produced HA is extracted through filtration from a positively charged column[10]. While we do not have a control to compare such products we found an academic spin-off company that extracts and quantifies HA based on nanopore platforms.