The dry-eye disease (DED) is a health problem complex to detect, especially in the early and/or mild stages, and often misdiagnosed as other ocular surface disorders. This is due to a bad correlation between symptomatology and clinical signs and compromises the life quality of patients. Most of times, decisions to manage DED are based on its phenotype and the treatment built on trial and error.

Dry-Eye Alert is intended to develop a point-of-care device to diagnose DED and grade its severity, basing on a multiplexed tear molecular panel. Instead of detecting a single biomarker, as other approaches do, the identification of multiple molecules allows for highly sensitive and specific diagnostic. Having a PoC device with this potential in the clinical setting would permit clinicians to diagnose and grade DED in a rapid and objective manner to direct an appropriate management. Moreover, it would also be suitable as evaluation end-point in the context of clinical trials, reducing the number of patients to be recruited and the parameters to be analyzed, thus optimizing their efficiency and cost.