Kephera Diagnostics is organized around development of innovative technologies for diagnosis of infectious diseases with particular emphasis on emerging diseases of major public health significance worldwide. To that end, Kephera personnel are working on developiment of rapid tests for infectious diseases using novel immunochemistry in point-of-care format. Based on principles of particle interaction combined with a simple device, the firm's proprietary assay technology enable rapid detection of specific antibodies or antigens associated with the target pathogen. The broadly enabling technology is applicable to a wide range of disease targets and applications. Kepheraâs expertise extends from antigen discovery using microarrays and peptide libraries to assay development, clinical studies and validation. Kephera is particularly focused on development of a test for Zika virus infection an effort structured around identification of Zika-specific and Dengue-specific epitopes within the viral genome, from which an immunoassay will be developed in convenient and cost-effective ELISA format, and ultimately translated to point-of-care format. To this end, the firm's personnel are collaborating with medical research institutes in the U.S. and in Latin America to analyze the immunological reactivities of patient sera from Zika and Dengue-endemic regions. Involving a variety of epitope mapping techniques, epitopes are selected based on ability to differentiate viral infections will then be expressed synthetically or as recombinant antigens for assay development. Other diseases of interest for study are Chagas Disease and Lyme Disease
