INTA Systems is the first spin-off of Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the Nanoscience Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-NANO). Its headquarters are located inside the NEST Laboratory in Pisa, a research center in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

INTA develops and produces lab-on-a-chips for the treatment and analysis of biological and non-biological fluids. The applications are biomedicine, security, industry 4.0, food-analysis. To this aim, INTA integrates knowledge and expertise in physics, nanotechnology, novel strategies for the use of materials and biomolecules, artificial intelligence-based data analysis.

BRAIKER will be the first product of INTA. It is a point-of-care portable device for the fast and cheap identification of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) from blood. With a small droplet of blood, BRAIKER can detect a panel of biomarkers linked to TBI and process the collected data with machine-learning techniques. BRAIKER's underlying technology is called nano-acoustics.

It is an extremely versatile approach to molecular analysis that will also find applications for detecting viruses, bacteria, and other analytes for non-biomedical applications.

EUREKA! VIEW

The technology displays significant potential in the pre-screening of TBIs, as well as for its use as a portable screening and diagnostic tool in remote locations away from hospitals. Also of interest are the possibility to expand the detection pool of analytes to other injuries/diseases (including viral infectious diseases) or to contaminants in air/water/food, as well as the business expansion into data analytics and associated services.