In 2022, Oceanit was selected as winner of the Pacific Business News’s first-ever Inno Fire awards in the category of technology, science, and data. The Inno Fire awards celebrate innovators who are driving progress in Hawai’i.
The team was honored in large part for the development of the ASSURE-100 rapid COVID-19 test kit, the first and only diagnostic from Hawai’i to ever receive emergency use authorization (EUA) by the U.S. FDA. ASSURE-100 received a point-of-care EUA in February, 2022 and an over-the-counter or “at-home” EUA in December of 2022.
“This is the first of many things we plan to do. We created a platform technology,” said Dr. Patrick Sullivan, Oceanit’s Founder and CEO. “We originally set out to look at diseases like cancer, we have a toolset for that. So our goal was really to address those issues.”
“But when the pandemic hit, we asked ourselves, what can we do to help make a difference and a rapid test is what we came up with. And took us a while to get there. Hawaiʻi doesn’t have a lot of the infrastructure, but we were determined to do it,” he said.
During the pandemic, spurred by projects like ASSURE-100, Oceanit expanded rapidly, adding many new scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to the Oceanit Ohana.
Oceanit was selected along with 4 other local Hawai’i companies in the Technology, Science & Data category. Oceanit will continue to play a role in delivering disruptive innovation, producing new products, and driving new solutions from mind to market.
You can read the full list of honorees here.
