VitalTrace completes $4M Investment Attraction Fund project to scale biosensor manufacturing

VitalTrace has successfully completed its $4M project under the Western Australian Government’s Investment Attraction Fund (IAF), which supports advanced manufacturing projects as part of an effort to diversify the state’s economy.

The funding helped us create Australia’s first continuous lactate biosensor manufacturing facility, here in Perth. The facility can produce 50,000 sensors a year, and our novel manufacturing methods are scalable to ~2M sensor a year within existing infrastructure.

Why manufacturing matters

Our advanced manufacturing capabilities and trade secrets are what drives value in a biosensor company. The foundational infrastructure opens up numerous applications for our continuous lactate monitoring platform beyond our beachhead market in childbirth.

Lactate is the chemical that tells us whether our cells and organs are getting enough oxygen. In hospitals, that includes newborns in neonatal intensive care, sepsis and critical care, where continuous lactate could replace repeated blood draws, and surgical and cardiovascular care, where tissue oxygen can be tracked through surgery and recovery. Outside hospitals, it tracks cardiovascular health and is the best measure of fitness.

Each new application of our CLM platform uses the same sensor and importantly, the same manufacturing line. A manufacturing base designed to scale to 2 million sensors a year makes this platform approach possible.

Every one of these applications generates something just as valuable as the reading itself: data. The first moments of life shape a person’s health for decades. Continuous lactate data captured during birth can help build foundational datasets for mothers and babies, giving us new insight into how events at birth ripple through the rest of a child’s life. As our sensors move into intensive care, surgery and consumer wearables, that picture extends across a lifetime.

This data set will enable AI to transform critical decisions in medicine and human health. The organisations that build and own these foundational datasets will help shape the next generation in-patient health monitoring and consumer wearables.

Scalable manufacturing is the first step in this process.

Thank you to the Western Australian Government for its support through the Investment Attraction Fund.

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