Final “nanoControl “project meeting: ”Development of nanoparticles as non-infectious full process controls for in vitro diagnostics”

Today, we had the final meeting of the nanoControl project in which we have been collaborating with the company “altona Diagnostics” to develop chitosan-based nanoparticles that can be used as positive controls in diagnostic kits. Of course, in such a kit for the diagnosis of a virus such as Ebola, you cannot use the virus itself as a positive control. Thus, Dr. Stephan Kolkenbrock, who is heading a research group at altona, remembered his days as a postdoc in our group and contacted us, suggesting a joint project to develop chitosan nanoparticles loaded with short viral DNA or RNA sequences as such full process controls. The term indicates that these nanoparticles would be added directly to an aliquot of the patient sample and undergo the complete process of DNA/RNA extraction and PCR detection, eventually allowing to verify that the assay worked. Then only, a negative result can be accepted as being indeed negative! We obtained financial support for this project from the Zentrale Innovationsprogramm Mittelstand (ZIM) of the Federal Ministry of Economy and Energy (BMWi), and we have been working on it since about three years. Despite the pandemic which has slowed down our project significantly – we were not always allowed to work in the lab and altona was busy preparing Corona test kits – we have made very good progress. Jointly, we have identified the best suited chitosan and developed methods for its nano-formulation and loading with nucleic acids, and tests using these as full process controls have been successful. Of course, there is still a significant way to go for the company until these will become part of their commercial kits, but technology transfer between our groups has worked very well. All in all, it has been a very rewarding collaboration, and we are planning at least two papers which we will eventually publish.