A concept-stage program exploring compact, cartridge-based blood gas and critical metabolite measurement for future use in emergency and intensive care settings where centralised laboratory turnaround is too slow for clinical decision-making.
The problem we are addressing
In critical care and emergency medicine, metabolic status information is time-critical. The pH, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, lactate concentration, electrolytes, and glucose of a critically ill patient's blood can change significantly within minutes. Therapeutic decisions — ventilator settings, fluid resuscitation strategy, vasopressor dose, insulin dosing — must be made based on current, not historical, values.
Conventional blood gas analysis requires centralised laboratory equipment — expensive, large, reagent-intensive analysers that are typically unavailable at the bedside or in secondary care hospitals. In India, less than 5% of hospitals below tertiary level have functional blood gas analysers. Patients in respiratory failure, septic shock, or diabetic ketoacidosis in secondary hospitals receive delayed or absent metabolic characterisation.
Our research approach
VitalGas is exploring a compact, single-use cartridge-based measurement concept for critical care blood analytes — targeting pH, pO2, pCO2, lactate, electrolytes (Na, K, Cl), and glucose — using a miniaturised electrochemical and optical sensing array integrated within a sealed cartridge. The concept is designed for bedside or near-patient operation with fingertip-prick or arterial-line sample collection, delivering results within minutes without requiring a central laboratory.
A central open research question concerns electrochemical sensor precision and inter-cartridge consistency for critical-care analytes.
VitalGas is at concept and research stage. No device has been built or validated. No clinical performance data exists. Nothing described constitutes a claim of clinical measurement capability for any critical care parameter.
What it's for
VitalGas is a rapid analysis product that turns a small blood sample into a meaningful signal — portable, fast, and accessible.
Intended deployment
A compact, cartridge-based workflow could help clinicians read blood gases and metabolites at the bedside in minutes — without sending samples to a central lab.
In transport settings, every instrument must be compact, fast, and easy to clean. VitalGas is designed around a small fingertip-prick sample where time and patient burden matter.
For monitoring recovery, repeated venous draws are not always ideal. A fingertip-prick cartridge offers a lower-burden pathway for near-patient checks.
Why it matters
A fingertip-prick — a gentler path to a useful answer.
Insight without the wait.
Goes where the patient is.
Designed to be available, not rationed.
Meaning, drawn from the simplest of samples.
Questions
It is designed to turn a small blood sample into a meaningful signal — framed at a high level here, without revealing the underlying mechanism.
Built for critical and bedside care, and for the wider mission of reaching communities beyond centralised healthcare.
BIQADX is at a pre-clinical, prototype stage — VitalGas is not currently available for commercial sale. We welcome partnership and pilot conversations.
In critical care, minutes decide outcomes — we are working so the most fragile patients never wait on a distant laboratory.