PhD trainee Pouriya Bayat prepares Mango for diagnostic test.
October 28, 2025
By Eileen Hoftyzer
This story was originally published on the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy’s website.
The portable device, developed by the Pardee lab, allows decentralized diagnostics and drug manufacturing, improving healthcare accessibility.
Similar to a pod coffeemaker that can brew a single cup on your desktop at the touch of a button, a device dubbed Mango (Manufacturing on the Go), developed by researchers at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, allows scientists and health care workers in remote and low-resource locations to manufacture diagnostic enzymes for on-site testing and small batches of therapeutics on demand.
“Health care and research in low- and middle-income countries – but even in remote areas of Canada – are at a disadvantage because they just can’t access the tools they need,” says Keith Pardee, associate professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. “Our lab is dedicated to improving access to the tools of health care – whether that’s through diagnostics, drug manufacturing, and more recently, tools for research.”
For more than a decade, Pardee and his research team have been working to improve health care access in low-resource settings, developing portable devices and freeze-dried reagents that can diagnose infectious diseases and produce small batches of drugs.
By using synthetic biology and cell-free systems, the team isolates and freeze-dries the molecular machinery that underpins protein synthesis in the cell. These reagents can then be transported without a cold chain, meaning that they can reach remote locations and places without sophisticated cold storage equipment. The freeze-dried components are then used with the Mango device, which includes hardware that can be programmed for small-batch manufacturing of proteins for diagnostic testing or treatment.
In collaboration with research teams in Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, Mango has been used to diagnose infectious diseases common in the Global South, such as Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. And the results so far have been promising.
While the team has been refining Mango’s use for bioreagents and drug manufacturing, the field of RNA-based vaccines and treatments has been growing in recent years, especially since the success of the mRNA-based vaccine for COVID-19. In response, Pardee and his team plan to adapt Mango to RNA biomanufacturing, which is currently highly centralized.
Decentralizing manufacturing improves access for remote populations
RNA-based therapeutics have potential to be used for vaccines for infectious diseases, as well as precision treatments for conditions such as cancer and neurological diseases. But manufacturing these therapies requires specialized factories and expertise, and transporting them requires extremely cold conditions. As a result, RNA biomanufacturing is concentrated in a few biotech hubs, and transportation is limited to locations that have the proper storage facilities – while communities and populations without the required equipment are left behind.
This is exactly the kind of problem that Pardee tackles through his research. By adapting Mango from producing protein-based tools to RNA-based therapeutics, it could be used to manufacture smaller batches (thousands of doses instead of millions) of vaccines at the point of use, completely bypassing the need to transport and store vaccines under specific conditions.
“Right now, manufacturing of RNA vaccines and therapies are done in large factories that are very high quality and have lots of quality control,” says Pardee. “The real research challenge is how you take that system and put it into a box the size of a football and make it reliable.”
Pardee recently received a U of T Derrick Rossi Innovation Award to adapt Mango for RNA biomanufacturing, starting with the mRNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 as proof of concept.
Pardee has teamed up with Bowen Li, assistant professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, who is an expert in mRNA vaccines and developing the mechanisms required to deliver mRNA to their target locations in the body. Once they have validated that the device can produce the vaccine in Toronto, they will work with their collaborator in Brazil, Lindomar Pena, to further validate that the device can produce the vaccine in other settings.
Pardee says that such a device has applications beyond low-resource settings. In particular, personalized therapies for rare conditions are prohibitively expensive to produce in small quantities, but as RNA-based therapies for these conditions are developed, Mango could produce these therapies for significantly lower cost. The technical and regulatory challenges to bring this to market will be substantial, but Pardee says his team’s priority is to first show that it is possible, and then the research community together can take on the next challenges.
His team is also working on developing research tools that could be deployed to low-resource settings, which would build capacity in these settings and offer long-term sustainability for local researchers to study diseases and therapeutics in their communities. The goal of all this work is to improve access and, ultimately, health outcomes for people regardless of their proximity to major research centres. Working at 10 sites around the world, Pardee and colleagues have just submitted the results from this proof-of-concept work for publication and hope to share the results soon.
“We’ve been focused on the patient-facing side of health care and therapeutics, but now we’re also focusing on the research side, because if you don’t have the capacity to make drugs or study the disease process of a local infectious disease, then you’re at a real disadvantage,” says Pardee. “By decentralizing access to research tools, we can reduce the cost and delays we currently have and benefit more people sooner.”