On August 27, 2026, Swedish point-of-care diagnostics company Readily Diagnostics announced it had received a grant from the Gates Foundation to develop an affordable molecular test for the world's three most common curable sexually transmitted infections — chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis — designed for use in low- and middle-income countries. EU-Startups reported the grant at approximately €811,000 (about 9 million SEK).

Why It Matters

STI testing is the least glamorous and most consequential segment of sexual wellness. The three targets here account for hundreds of millions of new infections a year, all are curable, and all are routinely undiagnosed in settings where the nearest molecular lab is a day's travel away. Presumptive syndromic treatment — dosing on symptoms without a test — is the default in much of the world, and it is precisely the practice that has driven gonorrhea toward the resistance cliff. A cheap test that can also read resistance markers attacks both problems at once. There is a high-income read on this too. Every constraint Readily is engineering around for low-resource settings — no instrument, no lab, minutes not days — is the same constraint that limits at-home and retail STI testing in the US and Europe, where at-home kits still mostly mean mailing a sample and waiting. A genuinely instrument-free molecular platform with a sub-30-minute turnaround has an obvious second life in pharmacy counters, sexual health clinics and DTC kits, and it would compete directly with the mail-in model that Everlywell, LetsGetChecked and myLAB Box built their businesses on. Two caveats worth holding. This is early concept and feasibility funding, not a commercialization round — there is a long road between padlock-probe chemistry that works on respiratory targets and a validated, regulator-cleared STI panel. And the antimicrobial resistance detection, which is the most valuable feature clinically, is also the hardest part to get right. Watch for the first published performance data on the STI panel; that is the milestone that determines whether this becomes a product or a grant report.

The technical target is what makes this interesting. Readily's platform runs on padlock-probe chemistry, originally developed for respiratory infections and now redirected at STIs, and is built to deliver a molecular-grade yes/no result in 15 to 30 minutes from a urine sample or vaginal swab — with no instruments, no cold chain, no electricity and no specialist training. The company's stated performance figures are roughly 99% sensitivity across 10-plus targets. If that holds in an STI panel, it collapses the diagnostic pathway from send-to-lab-and-wait into a single clinic visit.

The grant also funds something the field badly needs: the test is designed to detect genetic markers of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which the World Health Organization lists as an urgent resistance threat. Per the company, the funding covers early concept and feasibility work — sample preparation, antimicrobial resistance detection, and a full product-development roadmap — developed open-access and in line with the foundation's global access principles.

"Readily is committed to delivering accessible molecular diagnostics. A diagnosis should not depend on where you happen to live," CEO Liza Löf told EU-Startups. "This grant from the Gates Foundation lets us show that an accurate STI test can also be simple and affordable enough to use anywhere. That is the whole point of the technology we have built." Readily was founded in 2022 as a spinout of Uppsala University and is built around an invention by Löf that compresses molecular detection into a single 30-minute reaction. The company recently added Pernilla Roxin as Chief Operating Officer as it moves toward commercialization.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-28

{Initial entry — story first created.}