Worldcare Technologies

Worldcare Technologies is a California public benefit corporation developing a low-cost, high-performance HIV viral load testing system for use in the developing world. Our test will be point-of-care (POC) and affordable for clinical use in rural settings. About 37 million people in the world are living with HIV; two-thirds of these live in low resource settings, like Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia. Access to treatment has expanded rapidly, with millions of patients on antiretroviral treatment (ART) worldwide. Once on ART, patients must be monitored over the long term, ideally with a viral load test. This testing is essential to help clinicians quickly detect treatment failure, and limit the spread of drug resistance. Unfortunately viral load tests are not widely used across the world. One study showed that in Malawi, just 10% of HIV patients taking medicine received even 1 viral load test in a year. Primary barriers to access include cost, complexity, and infrastructure constraints. Doctor Without Borders has called for a viral load system under $1000 per system and under $10 per test. Due to limited technician availability the system should be easy to use and repair. And lastly, unreliable electricity precludes the use of any chemical reagents requiring cold storage, as in the testing systems on the US market. To meet this necessity, we are developing a point of care viral load testing system that matches the efficacy of commercial tests and eliminates the need for cold chain storage through a proprietary lyophilization (or freeze drying) method for our reagents. We are currently seeking funding support to complete laboratory development of our system and conduct initial clinical trials, after which we will seek further funding to scale up.