Drava Life Sciences is a cancer genetics startup and contract research organisation (CRO) based in Manipal, India. Operating at the intersection of oncology research and translational diagnostics, Drava combines molecular biology expertise with a growing portfolio of genomics-driven project collaborations. 

Central to Drava's current R&D pipeline is the development of an isothermal amplification platform - specifically, Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA). This technique, which operates without the thermocycling requirements of conventional PCR, holds particular promise as the engine behind a point-of-care diagnostic system capable of functioning in remote or resource-limited environments. The goal is straightforward but technically demanding: identify, amplify, and purify specific amplicons of interest with enough reliability and simplicity that the workflow could one day be deployed as a handheld detection kit.

As the RPA platform took shape, the team quickly identified a critical vulnerability in their workflow - the purification step. Traditional spin column-based purification introduced losses that were difficult to tolerate when working with amplicons destined for sensitive downstream detection.

"Spin columns weren’t even an option in our case," explains the team's lead scientist, Linda Alex. "There's a lot of loss of DNA within the column. In a diagnostic context where you're working with specific, often low-abundance amplicons, that loss isn't acceptable."

Beyond recovery, the logistical constraints of column-based methods posed another challenge. For a platform being designed with simplicity and deployability in mind, any purification step requiring centrifugation, precise column handling, or complex liquid transfers was antithetical to the end goal. The team needed a clean-up solution that was fast, column-free, and should scale down to a point-of-care format without sacrificing reliability.

Existing solutions on the market either demanded too much infrastructure or provided inconsistent recovery - particularly when fragment sizes varied or sample input was limited. The pressure was compounded by the need to maintain clean, high-fidelity amplicons with minimal background signal going into detection assays. Any carryover of primers, salts, or short DNA artefacts would compromise the specificity of their diagnostic readout.

During their evaluation of magnetic bead–based alternatives, the team came across CamSelect NGS - a magnetic bead–based nucleic acid cleanup and size selection system designed for PCR cleanup, amplicon purification, and flexible NGS workflows. Unlike conventional column-based methods, CamSelect NGS uses a simple magnetic stand-based workflow that eliminates centrifugation while enabling efficient recovery and tunable fragment selection. 

"Using a magnetic bead-based purification is a better choice for us," says Linda. "It helps in reducing the time in which the purification is done, and it also helps in achieving a better recovery of DNA." 

Across the project collaborations where CamSelect NGS has been deployed, the team at Drava has observed consistently cleaner amplicon profiles. Short DNA artefacts and primer-dimer carryover were markedly reduced. QC traces showed sharper, more defined peaks with reduced background, giving the team greater confidence in the quality of material going into their detection assays.

"We're able to actually detect and purify the specific amplicon of interest," the team notes.

In an RPA-based workflow where amplicon selection and purity are central to assay performance, that repeatability translates directly into more reliable experimental outputs and more interpretable results for their collaborators.

The speed of the purification process also made a meaningful difference. Without centrifugation steps and with a straightforward bead-binding and wash protocol, hands-on time dropped considerably. This is particularly significant in a CRO environment where multiple projects run in parallel and time spent on any single step has knock-on effects across the schedule.

"It reduces the time in which the purification is done - a small operational shift, but one that compounds across a high-volume, multi-project workflow.” says Linda.

The adoption of CamSelect NGS has influenced how Drava's team thinks about purification not just as a technical step, but as a design constraint. Because the bead-based workflow is so lightweight, it has opened up the possibility of integrating purification into downstream diagnostic formats that were previously incompatible with conventional clean-up methods.

This is where CamSelect NGS becomes more than a lab reagent - it becomes a design enabler. The column-free, magnetic stand–based approach means that purification can, in principle, be incorporated into a compact, deployable diagnostic kit without requiring laboratory-grade infrastructure. For a team building toward point-of-care cancer diagnostics in remote settings, that possibility is significant.

CamSelect NGS is manufactured under ISO 13485, providing the quality assurance framework that clinical and translational research teams increasingly require from their reagent suppliers. That consistency - lot-to-lot and run-to-run - has been evident across Drava's use of the product in multiple collaborative projects, reinforcing the team's confidence in it as a dependable part of their molecular toolkit.

Setting new Standards: Toward point-of-care and beyond

The team at Drava is actively working to validate and extend their isothermal amplification assays across new cancer genetics applications, and they anticipate an expanding role for CamSelect NGS as those projects scale. 

"CamSelect can become a game changer in the field of detection within remote areas," says Linda.

"It can create a kind of handy detection kit which can be used by anyone - like a point-of-care device, like a diagnostic kit. It has the potential to come into picture in that way."

CamSelect NGS is a magnetic bead–based nucleic acid purification product manufactured under ISO 13485, designed for PCR clean-up, size selection, and amplicon purification across a broad range of NGS and molecular diagnostics applications.

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