RizLab (IndieBio NY & HAX) has developed an ultra-compact, all-electronic cytometer capable of quantifying white blood cells and the key subtypes with just a prick of the finger—with 97% accuracy, as validated by the recent clinical trial results published in PLOS One.

RizLab’s CytoTracker can quantify important WBC parameters such as the total white blood cell count, the absolute neutrophil count, and the absolute lymphocyte count, along with the percentages. Existing FDA-approved, commercially available analyzers for white blood cell count analysis are expensive, bulky, and require professionals to use.

In collaboration with a clinical team at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Pediatric Clinical Research Center led by Dr. Tanaya Bhwomick and the Baylor College of Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine, the CytoTracker was successfully tested in trials by pitting the device in a head-to-head comparison with a lab benchtop hematology analyzer, a conventional blood testing technique.

Founded in 2018 by Mehdi Javanmard, RizLab Health is a spinoff of the Nano Bioelectronics Laboratory at Rutgers University.

“We set out to solve one of the holy grails of medicine, which is to analyze a tiny amount of a patient’s blood in a way to give guidance to clinicians and improve clinical outcomes,” Javanmard said. “We believe this will have a huge impact in infectious disease, oncology, and psychiatry.”

Javanmard added: “Others have made failed attempts to tackle this holy grail by aiming to identify dozens or even hundreds of biochemical constituents with a single drop of blood. Such attempts are fundamentally very difficult. As a result, we found it to be much more realistic to focus only on the white blood cells with the key sub-types as a start.”