Atonarp Microsystem is developing a painless way of doing blood tests

Engineers and entrepreneurs around the world have been nurturing this dream: a way to detect and measure molecules in the blood without pricking.

For Prakash Murthy, an Indian entrepreneur now living in Japan, the dream was fueled by his upbringing in a small town in Karnataka. India has one of the largest populations of diabetics in the world, but many patients go undiagnosed or live with uncontrolled blood sugar.

What if he could develop a simple test, painless and cheap, that rural folks could do frequently?

After nine years of work, Murthy’s Tokyo-based company, Atonarp Microsystem, has a prototype device that can pass light through your skin and give your blood glucose reading. Atonarp will move the device from Tokyo to its Bangalore office early next year, and try to reduce the cost to affordable levels. If it works, it has a powerful method that can be extended to other clinical tests.

Atonarp is Murthy’s third company. He had set up and sold two companies after his engineering degree in 2001, and had moved to Japan during his third venture, the engineering services company C2Silicon. It is still run by another founder when Murthy set up Atonarp in 2009, to develop a technology to sense gases in low volumes.

The company managed to shrink the device, making the world’s smallest gas-sensing spectrometer, and giving companies a portable machine to test for gases in pipelines in real time.

Since sensors were the heart of this venture, medical diagnostics was the next step. Murthy believes that he has now grasped the future of medical diagnostics, a belief that many other entrepreneurs have also had at one time.

“Many people have tried non-invasive blood measurement,” says Mark Martin, an industrial automation consultant in Boston. “Prakash has a real chance of driving the breakthrough.”

As the former vice-president of industrial automation in Analogue Devices, he was on the board of Atonarp and had watched the company closely. Atonarp has raised $7 million so far from a variety of investors, including from Analogue Devices, WRV Capital and Nipro, the $2.5 billion Japanese medical devices company. “We believe that molecular imaging is the future of diagnostics,” says Ganapathy Subramaniam, partner of WRV Capital.

Atonarp does the core science in Japan, the engineering hardware and marketing from the US, and all the software and algorithms from Bangalore. Its largest office is in Bangalore, from where it develops vital technologies for shrinking the prototype device.

In the future, as the company works on shrinking the device and reducing the cost, Bangalore will play an increasingly important role. In fact, Bangalore is at the heart of the company’s future expansions.

Scientists had been trying for a long time to diagnose diseases by shining a light through the skin. Molecules in the blood absorb and give off radiation, a property that would be enough for them to decide the presence of a molecule in the blood. However, human diversity makes things difficult for scientists.

“Each person’s skin is different,” says S Ramaswamy, biophysicist and scientist at the Institute of Stem Cell Research in Bangalore. “So it is hard to get consistent results.” Scientists had cracked the problem in measuring oxygen in the blood, because hemoglobin changes colour when it picks up oxygen, which can be easily imaged. Other molecules do not.

This is why companies around the world have failed in non-invasive testing, and why it is so challenging for Atonarp. The recent failure of the high-profile American firm Theranos, which raised $800 million and was charged with fraud, has made making breakthrough products a difficult thing for all innovative companies. Atonarp finds it a blessing in disguise. “Theranos is good news for us,” says Lukas Brueckner, principal scientist of Atonarp. “People now ask me a lot of critical questions.”

Lukas, a PhD from Germany in the highly-specialized area of multiphoton imaging, was looking for a job in the US when he saw the advertisement from Atonarp. “The job profile fitted me perfectly,” says Brueckner. Mult-photon imaging is a technique that attempts to get the picture of many molecules with one short pulse of light. So short that the pulse lasts only a tiny fraction of a second. But it is enough, thinks Murthy and others at Atonarp, to conduct as many as 20-30 blood tests simultaneously at the moment.

Murthy’s long-term dream is to get people to go for a blood test once in six months, tying up such a test in developed markets with insurance coverage. Biologists have been discovering new molecular markers in the blood that predict the development of diseases early, and an easy test that can detect them would help doctors tackle diseases before they start.

Many types of cancers can be cured if detected early. Heart disease and neurological diseases could be controlled, and diabetes prevented. But for this, diagnostic companies need to provide a highly accurate and easy test that can pick up blood markers early enough.

For widespread use in the world, especially in the rural areas, clinicians would need a small device into which a patient can push a finger and get a diagnosis in seconds. It can revolutionise healthcare, and it is what Murthy is trying to attempt.

Murthy’s self-belief stems from the precision of his sensors and the strength of his software engineering team. “When detecting ions,” says Murthy, “we count the number of ions. Nobody else does that.” This sensing ability provides a method to detect, with the prototype, around 20 molecules in the blood in a few seconds. Murthy believes he can increase this count to 40.

The prototype device of Atonarp is as big as a standard hardback book, and will cost $2000 a test when it hits the market. At this price, the device is unlikely to sell in the Indian market. The company’s aim is to shrink it down to the size of a mobile phone, with a similar reduction in price. “Sensor companies fail after the prototype,” says Martin. “I know Atonarp is close. I have confidence that they will succeed.”

A non-invasive and high-precision device can turn current diagnostic methods upside down, by shifting a lot of diagnosis from the lab to the doctor’s clinic. Testing becomes as easy as measuring blood pressure and oxygen saturation in the blood. In fact, oxygen saturation measurement is now done by attaching a device to the finger. How quickly can routine blood testing follow this lead? “They will eventually crack it,” says Ramaswamy. Five years seems a good enough bet.