Getting More From the Gold You Already Trust
The Value and Limits of Vigilant Diagnostics Thermal Contrast Amplification™ Technology in Lateral Flow. Colloidal gold has been the workhorse label of lateral flow assays for decades. It’s cheap, it’s stable, it’s manufactured at enormous scale, and — critically — it sits inside assays that developers have already validated and, in many cases, already put in front of regulators. The…
A Quick Update From the Bench at Vigilant Diagnostics
Our latest LED Thermal Contrast Amplification (TCA) reader achieved more than 16x the sensitivity of a commercially available, widely used optical lateral flow assay (LFA) reader running the same strip. For both R&D and clinical applications, sensitivity is often the gating factor — it determines which analytes you can detect, how early you can detect them, and how small a…
Let’s Talk About Test Sensitivity
In point-of-care diagnostics, sensitivity is back in the spotlight — not as an academic metric, but as a practical constraint. As respiratory panels expand (Covid, flu, RSV) and testing shifts closer to the patient, the industry is again confronting a familiar tension: speed and simplicity versus missed low-level positives. Visual lateral flow assays (LFA) remain attractive for access and cost,…
Vigilant’s Latest Technology Presentation
On July 15, 2025, the International Institute for Biosensing (IIB) hosted Prof. John Bischof in its Precision Sensing Lecture Series. Bischof, the founder of Vigilant Diagnostics, is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and a faculty member in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. He serves as Director of both the University of Minnesota Institute for Engineering in Medicine…
Vigilant Invited to Present at Prestigious Diagnostics Conference
The founder of Vigilant Diagnostics, John Bischof, PhD, was invited earlier this year to give a presentation at the most influential diagnostics conference in the country, the Next Generation DX Summit in Washington DC. The title of John’s talk was “A Breakthrough in Colorimetric Lateral Flow Diagnostics: An LED-Based Handheld Thermal Contrast Reader.” This blog post is a Q&A with John about his experience at the event.
We Were Excited to Present at MedCity INVEST
On September 24, 2020, we were honored to be one of five startups invited to pitch in the “Home Health” session of a conference called MedCity INVEST Digital Health. This was the fourth year of the event, and the first to be held virtually via the Zoom platform. The event spanned five days and had a packed agenda, with many notable…
VigilantDX Pitches at the ‘Midwest COVID-19 Innovation Showcase’
We were delighted to be selected as one of 14 startups, from 110 that applied, to present at a great virtual event yesterday. It was put on by the gBeta Medtech folks, part of the very well respected gener8tor startup accelerator, which is ranked in the top 15 of such programs in the country. It has a presence in Minnesota,…