A patient at a sexual health clinic could get a definitive diagnosis for multiple sexually transmitted infections in 30 minutes, while still in the waiting room, rather than waiting days for a lab result. Current practice relies on sending swabs or urine samples to central laboratories. Results often arrive after the patient has left, forcing clinicians to either delay treatment or prescribe antibiotics presumptively—frequently for the wrong infection or unnecessarily. This contributes to antibiotic resistance and missed or prolonged infections. Atlas Genetics is developing a small, rapid diagnostic device called the io® platform that processes a patient sample at the clinic and returns laboratory-quality results for key STI pathogens within half an hour. The project also studies how to integrate this technology into real sexual health services—mapping clinic workflows, decision-making, costs, and barriers to adoption. If successful, the test could shift STI care from delayed, guess-based treatment to immediate, targeted therapy. This would improve patient outcomes, reduce inappropriate antibiotic use, and streamline sexual health clinic operations—a quiet but significant upgrade to a public health system that currently runs on slow logistics rather than fast diagnostics.
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A rapid stratified medicine diagnostic test for STI patients at the point-of-care. Atlas Genetics are developing a rapid, multi-pathogen, point-of-care (POC) diagnostic test for patients presenting at sexual health clinics, to enable the stratification of these patients, allowing sexual health professionals to direct immediate and effective treatment based on these test results. Current sexual health clinical pathways rely on large central laboratory analysers to provide the test result to aid diagnosis. The logistics associated with the use of these systems means the test results are not available at the initial patient visit, resulting in either delayed treatment or the clinician presumptively treating the patient, often incorrectly or unnecessarily. The Atlas Genetics io® (POC) platform provides laboratory quality results in 30 minutes from the clinical sample (swab or urine) and the development of the multi-pathogen sexually transmitted infection test (MSTI) will give clinicians a definitive diagnosis on these key STI pathogens whilst the patient waits. Concurrent to MSTI test development, the successful collaboration in SBRI Phase 1 between Atlas Genetics and the Applied Diagnostic Research and Evaluation Unit (ADREU) at St George’s University of London (SGUL) and Public Health England (PHE) and Aquarius Population Health (APH) will continue, developing an enabling infrastructure and guidance for effective adoption of this product. This will be based on acquiring knowledge on the facilitators and barriers to adoption of the Atlas Genetics io® Instrument with Atlas’ CT/NG stratified medicine diagnostic cartridges deployed in, and evaluated for, clinical use in exemplar sexual clinics across the UK. The programme will include a proactive phase of garnering the necessary local knowledge of process, decision making, acceptability and economic impacts to inform the development and submission of strong and locally relevant business cases for adopting the technology beyond Innovate funding and lead to paving the way for adopting the io® MSTI product in sexual health services, once commercially available.
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