What is the name of your organization?
Frontier
What is the name of your solution?
Accelerated Skin Prick Test
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
An accessible, cost-effective allergy diagnostic test which incorporates AI & cost engineering to be safely and accurately administered anywhere.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Whippany, New Jersey
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Current allergy testing methods are inaccurate, costly, and inaccessible, disproportionately burdening under-served communities.
Traditional tests like skin pricks and IgE tests have various problems like–
i) A 50-60% false positive rate, leading to misdiagnoses.
ii) Cost hundreds to thousands of dollars creating financial barriers, especially for low-income families.
iii) Results that take hours or days, delaying care.
iv) Invasive procedures that cause discomfort, deterring patients.
v) Accessibility suffers in rural areas due to reliance on specialized labs, deepening health inequities.
This crisis is worsening with the global rise in allergies, now the 6th leading chronic disease in the U.S., affecting 50 million Americans. Food allergies in children have doubled since 2000, driving $18 billion in annual healthcare costs and 200,000 ER visits. Globally, millions face similar struggles, with under-served regions hit hardest due to limited resources. Today, the problem can’t even be well quantified because the vast majority of the population from middle and low-income countries lack access to testing.
These inefficiencies and inequities demand a solution that ensures accurate, affordable, and timely allergy testing for all.
What is your solution?
Our solution is the Accelerated Skin Prick Test (aSPT), which addresses critical barriers in allergy diagnosis, particularly for underserved populations facing high costs and limited access to specialists. aSPT aims to be an inexpensive, easily accessible and quick test.
The test is based on a two-layered testing kit design which utilizes a trained machine learning model to verify the severity of the test’s reaction.
Our solution combines two key technologies:
1/ An affordable, two-layer microneedle patch for painless, rapid (15-20 min), and precise allergen delivery. The top layer with microneedles patches pierces the skin with the secondary layer holding the allergens. This design minimizes cross-contamination, significantly reducing the high false-positive rates of traditional skin prick tests.
2/ An AI-powered mobile application analyses images of the test reaction using a CNN, providing accurate, reliable, and near-instantaneous severity assessments. This delivers actionable diagnostic insights directly to clinicians or potentially guided patients, easing the burden on specialized resources.
By drastically lowering costs (target <$15, alternatives can exceed $100), improving accuracy, simplifying the process, and reducing material waste, aSPT makes vital allergy diagnostics more accessible and sustainable, helping reduce financial hardship and improve health outcomes.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The aSPT serves anyone needing allergy testing but prioritizes those most impacted by current barriers: young children experiencing rising allergy rates (particularly lower income families), and individuals in previously under-served communities lacking access to diagnostics or specialists.
Traditional allergy tests are expensive, inaccurate and inaccessible (since they’re hard to administer and time-consuming). With this in mind, we designed the aSPT to be affordable ($5-$10), durable (not requiring complex logistics in shipping) and easy to administer anywhere by clinicians or trained personnel, breaking down geographic and economic barriers.
This reduction in cost and accessibility allows us to deliver this life changing solution to the smaller economies and underdeveloped regions across the world. At the same time, our test’s superior reliability makes it one of the best solutions even in established markets.
By making allergy testing affordable, anyone can be tested, in turn reducing parental anxiety and the significant financial strain of emergency visits or ineffective treatments (again, most important for kids).
Today, almost 1-in-50 Americans are estimated to have gone through a life-threatening allergic reaction with 1000s dying yearly; we think the aSPT is the key to bringing this number down.