Breathing easy is impossible for many, and a medtech startup wanting to change that has developed an award-winning device for collecting nasal fluid.
Half a billion people globally suffer from asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the two most common types of chronic respiratory illness, with these also causing four million deaths annually.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that more than a third of Australians live with chronic respiratory conditions, with 13.5 per cent suffering asthma or COPD.
“Our mission is to eliminate respiratory disease altogether,” Jonathan Limpah, Lead R&D Engineer at Diag-Nose.io told create. “It’s quite a big ask, but I think we’ve got to make small steps towards that and eventually one day we’ll reach it.”
For the moment, the focus is on the two most common breathing ailments. Biologics are available options for these, but there’s still a lot of trial-and-error, expense and suffering while waiting for such treatments to take effect.
Diag-Nose.io was officially formed in 2020 and is commercialising three products to properly understand the biology behind respiratory diseases, treat these more effectively with existing drugs, and help develop new ones.
Home-bred innovation
It all begins with a small but important step: taking a sample from a patient.
Mechanical engineer Limpah joined Diag-Nose.io to work on product design in the company’s early days, and remains focused on devices for sample collection.
A false start for the team was in rapid diagnostics devices, incorporating diluents and lateral flow assays and using blown secretion samples.
After moving on from technology to discern between bacterial and viral upper respiratory tract infections, the sampling approach switched to collecting proteins in epithelial lining from inside the nose.
Limpah used a Phrozen resin 3D printer, worth about $600 and set up in his laundry room to print the first version of what is now known as the ABEL Microsampler.
Fifteen iterations later, 3D printing is still used, though it’s a “biocompatible resin” in a final part rather than a prototype. A Formlabs Form 3B+ machine is used to make the main sampler body.
Of the other five parts, a couple are injection moulded.
“The other parts we laser cut and ultrasonically weld in-house, and there’s an OEM component as well to that,” Limpah explained.
A design consideration is the need to be inserted into a specific, targeted location – “just past the nares, so in the turbinates” – every time. Limpah described sampling as minimally invasive, and not probing as far as a nasopharyngeal swab does.
ABEL features an expanding probe to ensure that the absorbent material on the device, a highly wettable fibrous matrix, collects a precise volume of nasal fluid through its fixed geometry.
“Once it’s inserted, you can expand the mechanism,” Limpah said. “And so that’s what contacts your mucosal membrane lining, and it passively wicks the fluid from there.
“And then it’s able to be collapsed to protect the sample on the way out. So it reduces the debris and things like that in your nasal cavity, which often is what swabs would pick up.”
After years of development, 2025 has been an important year for the sampler, which is designed to be usable without an endoscope or lab training.
Earlier this year, it achieved a listing on both the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods and the US Food and Drug Administration as a Class 1 medical device, and has since been sold to several universities. In October, it was recognised with an Australian Good Design Award in the Product Design category. It was also just announced as a finalist in the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards.
This followed a $3.15 million seed round, completed in January, with backers including Radar Ventures, Specialty Physician Associates and Breakthrough Victoria.
Stanford and swabs
Diag-Nose.io has two other programs underway.
RhinoMAP is a digital diagnostic tool, using protein biomarkers collected from samples and machine learning “to map out biological subtypes of chronic respiratory disorders”.
It aims to enable better, patient-specific treatment choices by clinicians, and is scheduled for pilot access by researchers next year, clinics in 2027 and a launch in 2028. It received a boost in August with a Cooperative Research Centres Projects grant of $3 million, supporting an $8.4 million collaborative project involving Monash University, Mater Research, ENT Clinic Melbourne, Manse Medical, Invetech and Human Health.
NEBULA is a database for respiratory diseases, and which ingests datasets from biomarker studies, aiming to use them “to identify novel therapeutic targets” and optimise drug candidate selection.
Together, the programs hope to enable respiratory disease diagnosis, treatment and monitoring based on molecule-level evidence of causes, rather than based on “observable traits or symptoms” and guesswork.
The enterprise has its origins in a 2019 ENT Bio innovation program at Stanford University in California, where founder and CEO Eldin Rostom teamed up with three ENT surgeons: Dr David Yen, Dr Brian Wang and Dr Josie Xu.
Rostom switched to medical technology entrepreneurship after completing a degree in mechanical engineering.
“Back then, the dream was to work for Formula 1,” he told a Curtin University interviewer in 2024. “After graduation, I landed an interview with one of the Formula 1 teams. But unfortunately, things didn’t pan out and I was heartbroken.”
Limpah was both a fellow mechanical engineering student and a teammate on the Curtin Motorsport Team. He accepted an offer to relocate to Melbourne soon after the Covid lockdowns ended, excited by the chance to “use my skills for some impact”.
On the theme of Covid, create asked Limpah if he sees the ABEL Microsampler ever replacing the unpopular swabs.
“I would say that for the type of sample that we’re doing, which is high-fidelity, omics-grade samples, we would like to replace the swab and set a new standard for respiratory biology,” he said.
“There are still uses for swabs, for things like cell collection or quick diagnostic tests. But when it comes to generating data that truly captures the biology of disease, ABEL is the future.“
Personalised medical devices represent a new but fast-growing sector within the medtech industry. This on-demand webinar explores the regulation challenges facing engineers.
