The bottleneck
Most chest pain is not a heart attack.
Chest pain is one of the most common reasons people come to an emergency department, and most of those patients are not having a heart attack. Proving it takes time: rapid pathways often measure high-sensitivity troponin twice, an hour or more apart, usually on a central-lab analyzer. Beds, staff and patients wait for the second number.
Handheld analyzers
- Fast, near the patient
- One to a few markers per test
- Venous blood or plasma
Central-lab analyzers
- Sensitive, many assays
- Venous draw and a lab
- Results in tens of minutes to hours
Lifetime fingerprinting
Twelve markers, told apart by time.
Ordinary fluorescent labels are sorted by color, and colors overlap: past a handful of labels the signals blur together. Our crystals can also be made to fade at different, precisely tuned rates. The reader times the fade after each pulse, so twelve labels that look alike in color are still easy to tell apart.
Pick a marker to find its label:
Illustration. Crystal lifetimes are tuned by composition, size and core/shell design, typically microseconds to milliseconds.
Try it · run the panel
One drop. Two cartridges. One clear picture.
Choose a patient. Cartridge A asks whether the heart muscle is being injured right now. Cartridge B adds the context: clotting, inflammation and strain on the heart. The software combines all twelve into four risk readouts for the physician.
Cartridge AAcute injury · rule in or rule out
Cartridge BClot, inflammation, heart strain
Illustration with invented patients and values, shown relative to each marker's decision level (the white line). Not clinical guidance and not a cleared device.
Dual-cartridge strategy
Run one, the other, or both.
Two six-marker cartridges share one reader. Each can run on its own for a focused question, or together for the full cardiovascular profile, and a 6-marker cartridge is simpler to make than one 12-marker cartridge.
| Troponin (I or T) | The gold-standard marker of heart-muscle injury |
| Myoglobin | Rises very early after injury |
| CK-MB | Supports specificity and timing |
| H-FABP | Early marker, complements troponin |
| Copeptin | Helps rule out a heart attack early when combined with troponin |
| BNP or NT-proBNP | Strain on the heart's ventricles |
Goal: a fast, confident rule-in or rule-out for chest pain.
| D-dimer | Clotting activity, such as a pulmonary embolism |
| hs-CRP | General inflammation |
| ST2 | Heart remodeling and heart-failure strain |
| Galectin-3 | Fibrosis and heart-failure progression |
| MPO | Plaque instability |
| Lp-PLA2 | Inflammation in the artery wall |
Goal: turn a yes/no answer into a risk profile.
GDF-15, a marker of cardiovascular risk and prognosis, is a candidate for either cartridge.
From drop to decision
Five steps, about ten minutes.
A finger-prick of 20 to 40 microliters is split across both cartridges. The reader pulses a near-infrared laser, times the crystals' fade, and the software turns twelve numbers into a clinical summary.
Target timing for the concept, not measured performance.
Where it goes next
Today a rule-out. Tomorrow a platform.
The same reader and cartridge format can carry other panels, in the places care actually happens.
Intellectual property
Four pillars of protection.
The patent strategy protects the intersection that makes CardiacDx possible: diagnostic medicine, optical physics and device design together.
CardiacDx is a concept in development with NovaVera and is not a cleared medical device.
Partners wanted
Ten minutes to rule out. Twelve markers to understand.
We are looking for cardiology, emergency-medicine and diagnostics partners to bring CardiacDx to the clinic.
All diagnostics programs
One reporter. People, animals and the environment.
See the overview and readiness map →Intelligent Material Solutions invents the crystals and holds the intellectual property; NovaVera Corp. makes and sells them under an exclusive license. The field-proven lateral-flow tests are for research use only. Everything marked in development or concept is not a cleared medical, veterinary or environmental test; any product would need validation and, where required, regulatory clearance.
