Putting the power of the lab in your hand

If you attended the ADLM 2026 meeting this summer, you may have noticed some excited screaming and jumping up and down. That was the reaction of the nine employees of Kompass Diagnostics upon learning they had received this year’s Disruptive Technology Award from the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM). Kompass was recognized for its electrical transduction architecture (ETA), a compact testing platform developed to bring laboratory-grade analytical capabilities to resource-limited settings.  

Mingoo Kim, CEO of the company, described being named as an award finalist alone as a “huge win” for Kompass. Receiving the award — both from the audience and the judges — was the icing on the cake. “I think the audience really appreciated us because we weren’t discrediting conventional technology,” Kim explained. “My view is that, throughout history, every innovation has served its purposes all for the better. What we’re doing is just adding on to what’s existing to fill in a new need.”

As medical care shifts more toward the home, some self-collection devices have emerged, but those are still shipped back to the lab, Kim said. “If we could test in the home, that would be much more efficient and cost-effective. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

The vision that launched the company

The company’s chief technology officer, Hyoarm Joung, PhD, spent 25 years in diagnostic research and development in academia and industry settings. He has a track record of commercializing point-of-care tests, Kim said. “He is a visionary. For the past 25 years, he has always dreamed of building diagnostics that exhibit the same high performance as a laboratory instrument, but [are] accessible for home use — so very cost-effective but also small and easy to use.” Conventional technologies haven’t yet been able to meet that vision.

Joung partnered with June Jang, PhD (now the company’s chief scientific officer), an expert in semiconductors he had worked with at a national laboratory about 10 years prior. Jang was focused on commercializing field effect transistors (FETs), a type of semiconductor device, as scalable biosensors. Once Joung and Jang started collaborating, Jang asked Kim to come on board as CEO. Kim was a friend of Jang’s from engineering classes at Johns Hopkins University who went on to work in corporate research and venture capital. Together, the three of them birthed Kompass.  

Based in Chicago, the company is building on two intellectual properties exclusively licensed from Joung and Jang’s most recent employers, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Chicago.

The company was launched with the vision of accelerating healthcare's shift toward the home setting, Kim said. “Today [the market] is small, but if we look out a decade from now, two decades from now, that field is going to be massive,” he said. “I think the whole industry agrees that testing will continue to get closer to the patients, but no one really has had an idea of what that actually looks like. ETA is our approach to realizing that vision.’”  

An electrical approach to detection

At the heart of the technology is the ETA, an electrical method of sensing biomarkers. Unlike conventional methods that rely on optical detection, such as fluorescence or chemiluminescence, for example, ETA converts biological and chemical reactions into electrical signals that can be detected using semi-conductor electronics.  

“This assay method works across chemistry, immunoassay, and molecular diagnostics,” Kim said. “Regardless of what your analyte or biomarker is, it’s able to turn that target recognition event into charge signals.”  

In a chemistry assay such as glucose testing, for example, a target-specific reaction generates charged species that ETA can detect. With molecular tests, amplification of the target nucleic acid produces changes in charge that can be electrically detected. In immunoassays, target recognition is coupled to a conjugate-based reaction that generates a detectable charge signal.

“Once charge signals are generated, they are directed, by an electric field, toward an electrode surface where they can be detected,” said Kim. “Detection is confined to that electrode surface, which allows the system to exhibit high signal specificity and minimize matrix interference. The resulting electrical signal is then relayed to an FET remotely connected to the electrode.”

From fertility to viral testing

To start, Kompass is building Eltra, a point-of-care device that measures fertility hormones for in vitro fertilization or other treatments. “Fertility is a specialty that requires rapid results for same-day treatment decisions, which is why most fertility clinics operate their own in-house laboratories,” Kim said.  

However, building and operating an in-house lab is expensive, particularly given the relatively low daily testing volumes of fertility clinics compared with large hospitals. Alternatives are scarce: Blood measurements of estradiol, progesterone, and luteinizing hormone — which clinicians use to time egg retrieval or intrauterine insemination — may be outsourced to a local laboratory, but doing so often sacrifices the rapid turnaround needed for same-day treatment decisions. And even with an in-house laboratory, current workflows take several hours to return results to clinicians, a limitation that constrains monitoring visits to the early morning.

With Eltra, Kompass hopes to significantly reduce the cost of in-house fertility testing, Kim said. “Over the past decade, we’ve seen more than a double increase in the demand for fertility treatments, but we’re still only meeting 25% of total demand. We need to expand access to fertility care, and reducing the infrastructure required for hormone monitoring could make it easier for providers to expand capacity and open new points of care. How can we reduce these barriers to serial hormone monitoring, which directly impact clinical outcomes? By developing a much leaner device that can get the same, high-quality results to providers.”  

Eltra is designed to provide results within 10 minutes during a patient appointment, using just 10 µL of blood, and it could be used by multiple clinic staff members, from nurses to phlebotomists to ultrasound technicians. Obstetrician-gynecologists and their staffs could also use it in partnership with fertility clinics.  

Kompass is still developing Eltra and is eyeing the first half of 2028 to conduct clinical studies and the first half of 2029 to submit a dual submission to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clearance and a CLIA waiver, Kim said.  

Another product the company is developing using ETA is an ultrafast molecular test for respiratory viruses including COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) based on isothermal amplification. Many existing rapid molecular tests take around 20 minutes or longer, Kim said, while early testing of Kompass’ platform has demonstrated results from a nasal swab in approximately 3 minutes.

“If we can give faster results, that means you can screen, triage, and discharge patients faster,” he said. “Imagine a pediatric setting during flu season, and there’s a lot of patients, and you have to screen them. A parent with a sick child doesn’t want to wait another 30 minutes [for results] after seeing the physician, and the clinic wants to clear out the waiting area.”  

Kompass aims to finalize the design of its respiratory virus test by the first half of 2028.  

Home care is on the horizon for later, with these two applications for clinical use serving as deliberate steps on the path. “[By bringing testing to CLIA-waived point of care, for example,] we can first demonstrate that the technology performs reliably in the hands of minimally trained users, and build trust within the clinical community,” Kim said. Demonstrating strong performance on an application like this creates a foundation for eventually putting testing directly into patients’ hands at home.  

“We see this as a continuum, much like the evolution of glucose monitors from centralized lab testing, to point-of-care testing, and ultimately, to testing in the home,” Kim said.

Winning over the skeptics

People are initially doubtful when they hear that this one platform can do chemistry, immunoassay, and molecular testing in a palm-sized device using 10 µL of blood and still be as sensitive as a laboratory instrument, Kim said, so Kompass brought their whole team to their booth at ADLM 2026 to share information and answer questions.

“They come with skepticism, and we’re transparent about, ‘This is what we’ve figured out. This is what we haven’t, but we know how to approach it.’ People leave convinced. That’s what we were aiming for at the conference, and I think we did achieve that,” Kim said.

The Kompass team edged out two other finalists: Anvil Diagnostics, which became a finalist for its MycoScan assay, and Augurex Life Sciences, which earned finalist status for its SPINEstat immunoassay.  

MycoScan is believed to be the world’s first panfungal digital PCR blood test, capable of identifying nearly any fungal pathogen in a single, 3.5-hour workflow using 2 mL of plasma. The technology uses semi-specific primers that generate unique multilocus “fingerprints” for each target pathogen. Three active pilots are demonstrating real-world detection of Aspergillus, Mucorales, and Fusarium in patient samples.

SPINEstat is a blood-based diagnostic for axial spondyloarthritis. The technology measures multiple autoantibodies to 14-3-3eta, a joint-derived protein integral to inflammatory disease pathways. This immunoassay has achieved FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and regulatory approvals in Canada and Great Britain.  

Karen Blum is a freelance medical and science writer in Owings Mills, Maryland. +Email: [email protected] 

Read the full September-October issue of CLN.