Faster, safer, more reliable, and much more user-friendly antigen self-testing for covid-19 and other diseases is one of many needs revealed during the last few pandemic years. MERTEKIT – or Medical Ergonomic Rapid Testing Kit – is a novel solution to these challenges developed by engineers from IOCB Prague and the company Medirekt Partner.
MERTEKIT was specifically designed to simplify self-testing in remote or public places, for example during mass gatherings, using samples from the front of the nose and minimizing the risk of contamination.
“Currently for rapid antigen self-testing you have to set up a small lab on a table and then take samples one at a time, transfer them into a special solution, and then apply the solution to a test strip after extraction and wait for the result. This severely limits the ability to perform self-tests for small children, in a variety of challenging conditions, or perhaps before a mass gathering. That’s why we decided to develop a solution that would make self-testing possible with minimal skills and in provisional conditions,” says Vít Pokorný of IOCB Prague, the designer of the new kit.
“Our kit is an all-in-one package that makes it very easy to test yourself almost on the fly. This simplicity is absolutely essential not only for the convenience of the user but mainly because it gives you the opportunity to test yourself in difficult conditions and at the same time significantly reduces the risk of making a mistake and getting an incorrect result," says Jiří Sopuch, CEO of Medirekt Partner.
The solution has already been successfully clinically tested for SARS-Cov-2 and is also compatible with rapid antigen tests for other infections such as influenza and monkeypox.
MERTEKIT will be presented for the first time to those interested in licensing it at MEDICA 2022 in Düsseldorf, which is taking place 14–17 November 2022.