Seek Labs, a private TechBio company building programmable platforms to decode, program, and resolve diseases, announced the publication of a peer-reviewed manuscript in Nature Communications describing Annexing Isothermal Nucleotide Amplification (ANINA™), the proprietary amplification chemistry that powers its SeekIt™ molecular diagnostic platform. The publication, titled “Annexing Isothermal Nucleotide Amplification (ANINA) Enables Probe-Guided Amplification and Direct Detection at Ambient Temperature,” is available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-75361-6.
“For decades, molecular diagnostics have forced a compromise between performance and accessibility,” said Jared Bauer, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Seek Labs. “ANINA changes that equation. It delivers the sensitivity and specificity of molecular testing in a format that needs no equipment and no lab. The same chemistry can also run on standard lab instruments at two to four times the speed of qPCR, so the value extends into high-throughput laboratory settings as well.”
Every molecular test, regardless of setting, depends on four essential steps: target, capture, amplify, and read. Traditionally, those steps require specialized equipment, complex workflows and trained operators inside a laboratory. SeekIt integrates all four into a single molecular diagnostics platform. At the center of the platform is ANINA, a patented amplification technology built around a novel mechanism that runs a complete molecular test—from detecting the target to reading the result—in a single reaction at room temperature. Unlike conventional molecular tests, which require a separate detection step after amplification, ANINA’s probe does both jobs at once: it helps drive the copying process and remains attached to the result, allowing a positive or negative answer to be read directly from a paper strip without additional enzymes, heat, or processing steps.
“This is a chemistry advance, not a smaller box for an existing test,” said Annie Roy, Ph.D., Vice President of Diagnostic Research at Seek Labs and corresponding author of the publication. “We asked whether a test could have the accuracy of qPCR and the simplicity of an antigen test. ANINA is the answer. What gave us confidence wasn’t any single result; it was that the same chemistry held up across bacteria, viruses, and very different sample types. These results point to ANINA as a foundation for molecular testing across healthcare, veterinary medicine, global health, and biosecurity.”
The Nature Communications publication characterizes ANINA across pathogen types, sample matrices, and readout formats, testing two DNA viruses, an RNA virus, and a bacterial pathogen (White Spot Syndrome Virus, Epstein-Barr Virus, Respiratory Syncytial Virus, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae) in shrimp tissue, pooled human saliva, and simulated human urine. Detection was confirmed using both instrument-free lateral-flow strips and real-time fluorescence readout on a standard qPCR instrument.
Key findings related to ANINA reported in the publication include:
- High analytical sensitivity and specificity: Detected as few as one to ten copies of viral DNA in a human saliva sample—the level of infection present in the earliest stages of disease, before many rapid tests can identify it—and specifically identified a bacterial target in a separate urine sample with no false positives.
- Equipment-free, ambient-temperature operation: Delivered a positive or negative result at room temperature with no laboratory equipment, using only a paper strip.
- Lab-grade accuracy with faster turnaround: Matched qPCR’s quantitative accuracy in a real-time format while returning results two to four times faster on the same instrument.
- Real-world accuracy, confirmed in a natural infection: Detected early-stage infection in a living host (shrimp infected with White Spot Syndrome Virus) in under 45 minutes using only disposable components and no powered equipment, outperforming a commercially available rapid antigen test run on the same samples.
The SeekIt molecular diagnostic platform is currently under development and is not authorized or cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for diagnostic use. Human-pathogen data described in the publication were generated using contrived sample matrices. ANINA has not yet been evaluated in human clinical studies.
Based on these findings, Seek Labs is initially advancing SeekIt toward applications in respiratory diagnostics and biosecurity, with a focus on settings where rapid, lab-independent molecular testing can most directly affect outcomes.
About SeekIt™
SeekIt is Seek Labs’ molecular point-of-care diagnostic platform designed to bring testing out of laboratories and to the point of care. Built for speed, accuracy, portability, and scalability, SeekIt integrates Annexing Isothermal Nucleotide Amplification (ANINA™), the company’s patented amplification chemistry with sample extraction and lateral-flow detection into a streamlined system designed for rapid deployment across clinical, public health, and field environments.
About Seek Labs
Every disease has a sequence. Seek Labs is a TechBio company building the systems to decode, program, and resolve diseases. At the core of this system is an AI-powered intelligence layer that analyzes and translates sequences into actionable data, informing two deployment layers across Sequence Ablation Therapeutics (SAT) and molecular detection. Together, these systems form a continuous loop where genomic data is decoded, translated into therapeutic and diagnostic outputs, and refined through real-world deployment.
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Seek Labs is a proud member of BioHive, Utah’s collaborative life sciences ecosystem. Together with our partners, we’re building faster, smarter solutions for the world’s most urgent health challenges.
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