Every conventional blood test depends on chemical reagents. Removing them is extraordinarily hard — and it may be the single highest-leverage change in accessible diagnostics.
The hidden cost of the reagent model
From a basic complete blood count to a comprehensive metabolic panel, conventional testing relies on chemical reagents that bind to specific analytes and produce a measurable signal. That model imposes irreducible costs: manufacturing, quality control, cold-chain logistics, expiry management, and safe disposal — every one of which becomes harder the further you move from a well-resourced lab.
The scientific question
Blood is not an opaque black box. It is a complex biological medium whose optical, spectroscopic, and physical properties change in precise, measurable ways as analyte concentrations change. The research question BIQADX is exploring is whether those intrinsic properties can be read directly — characterising a sample through light–matter interaction rather than chemical conversion.
Why it is hard
No single optical approach can resolve the full complexity of a biological sample. Signals overlap, biological variability is high, and contact surfaces introduce interference. Our concept hypothesis is that multiple orthogonal sensing modalities, applied together to a single sample, can begin to separate what one method alone cannot.
SHBC and related reagent-free sensing work is at early R&D and concept stage. No analytical performance has been demonstrated. This is a fundamental research direction with significant scientific uncertainty.