Seek Labs, a private TechBio company building programmable platforms to decode, program, and resolve diseases, today announced the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 12,618,795 B2, covering Asymmetric Semi-Nested Isothermal Nucleotide Amplification (ANINA), a key assay design component of the company’s nucleic acid amplification chemistry for use in molecular diagnostic systems, called Seek Amplification™.
Molecular diagnostics are widely considered the gold standard for disease detection, but they perform poorly outside the lab because they require centralized laboratory infrastructure for amplification methods, such as thermal cycling (PCR) and conventional isothermal techniques. Seek Amplification™, Seek Labs' proprietary amplification chemistry, was engineered to reduce temperature and instrumentation constraints. ANINA, built on the Seek Amplification platform, removes the equipment requirement altogether, enabling detection-ready amplification under true point-of-care conditions and creating a foundation for decentralized molecular testing.
The patented approach introduces an asymmetric, semi-nested primer design in which two primers target regions upstream of the target sequence on one strand and a third primer targets the complementary strand. By combining this semi-nested architecture with a defined primer ratio, the system enables a single-reaction amplification process that preferentially generates single-stranded amplicons containing the target sequence. This architecture supports integration with downstream reporter-based detection formats, including fluorescent and electrochemical approaches.
“This patent underscores our approach to bringing high-performance molecular detection closer to the point of care,” said Jared Bauer, CEO of Seek Labs. “Instead of adapting legacy amplification methods, we have re-engineered the chemistry itself. By eliminating the need for equipment and simplifying the amplification workflow, Seek Amplification can create a path for molecular testing to move beyond centralized labs and into the places where real-world decisions are made.”
This chemistry is designed to enable molecular detection in decentralized and point-of-care settings where speed, simplicity, and accuracy are critical. It also forms the core amplification component within the company’s SeekIt™ platform, which supports flexible assay design across infectious disease targets and enables integration into both instrument-assisted and instrument-free formats. This positions SeekIt as a scalable platform for distributed molecular diagnostics.
This patent establishes foundational intellectual property for Seek Labs’ amplification chemistry platform as the company advances applications in respiratory and other infectious disease diagnostics.
About SeekIt™
SeekIt is Seek Labs’ molecular point-of-care diagnostics platform designed to bring testing out of laboratories and to the point of care. Built for speed, accuracy, portability, and scalability, SeekIt integrates nucleic acid extraction and amplification as well as detection into a streamlined system that can support 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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Bridget Baldwin, Director of Communications, Seek Labs
communications@seeklabs.com
