San Diego-based Cardea Bio, which is integrating biology with modern electronics, said today it has received a $1.1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund work that someday could detect infectious diseases like COVID and cancer via odor.

Targeting emerging countries, the goal of the project is to verify that Cardea can deliver bio-sensing receptors that work as an “electronic nose” through integration into its Biosignal Processing Unit platform, or BPU. If successful, the project could bring inexpensive, easy-to-use handheld diagnostics to parts of the world that don’t have access to medical testing facilities.

Computers have central processing units (CPUs) to run applications and graphics processing units (GPU) in order to render images. Cardea has created the BPU — which it claims is the first mass-produced chip that can link tiny bits of biology with modern semiconductor electronics.

“Using our BPU platform to bring novel and feasible diagnosis capabilities to developing countries was a major driver as to why we started Cardea in the first place,” said Michael Heltzen, chief executive of the company. “Developing an electronic nose with the potential to diagnose diseases like COVID, malaria, cancer and so on is literally a dream come true.”

Cardea Bio’s Biosignal Processing Unit(Courtesy of Cardea Bio)

The technology adds a graphene layer for biological material with semiconductors for processing, the company said. It can be mass produced to lower costs.

“The reason why that is clever is graphene is very conductive, but it is also bio-compatible,” said Lasse Gorlitz, a spokesman for Cardea Bio. “So, it allows you to actually attach live biology to a semiconductor and make a gateway where you can see what’s going on with the biology and monitor biological events.”

The company believes markets exist in drug development, diagnostics and agriculture, among other industries.

Cardea Bio was founded in 2019 through the merger of Nanomedical Diagnostics and Nanosens Innovations. It has 41 employees and achieved a valuation of about $87 million in its last funding round, said Gorlitz.

If this Gates Foundation project proves successful, Cardea said it could help validate the company’s BPU Platform across other sensing applications in fields such as healthcare, environmental monitoring, agriculture and bio-security.

For the “electronic nose,” Cardea Bio aims to create assays for its BPU based on insect odor receptors, said Gorlitz.

“They’re actually capable of detecting individual molecules,” he said. “It is much more precise than any other type of odorant detection that we know of currently.”