Quotient Limited announced planned major expansion for the intended use of its MosaiQ™ transfusion diagnostics platform to include nucleic acid testing (NAT) for donor molecular disease screening. If successfully developed, the additional NAT capability for MosaiQ™ would be groundbreaking for the global donor testing market, complementing the initial blood grouping and serological disease screening applications. MosaiQ™ is at an advanced stage of development and commercial scale-up and represents a truly novel testing platform for transfusion diagnostics, with proven capability to detect antibodies, antigens and now nucleic acid (DNA or RNA), as described below.

Through MosaiQ™, Quotient aims to provide donor testing laboratories with a unified instrument platform to be utilized for blood grouping and both serological and molecular disease screening of donated red blood cells and plasma. In the fourth quarter of calendar 2015, Quotient completed an initial feasibility study demonstrating the ability to detect nucleic acid using the MosaiQ™ methodology. In the study, Quotient and its external development partner successfully detected DNA sequences of the conserved region of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

This meaningful advancement enables Quotient to move forward with the next phase of product development for NAT on the MosaiQ™ platform, which involves further assay development and expansion of the test menu to include the Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C and West Nile viruses. The company expects to complete this next phase of development work during the first half of 2017. The incorporation of NAT on the MosaiQ™ platform will offer considerable advantages over existing approaches currently in use by donor testing laboratories, delivering operational cost savings and a reduced time to result, while also eliminating the need to pool samples.

Working with its development partner, Quotient intends to redeploy existing internal resources on development of the additional NAT applications following completion of assay development for the blood grouping and serological disease screening applications.