MeMed, an Israeli company specializing in molecular immunology, informatics, clinical infectious diseases and in vitro diagnostics, last week announced it has been awarded a $9.2 million contract by DoD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to fund the completion of MeMed’s point-of-care platform for distinguishing bacterial from viral infections.
“We are excited by this vote of confidence. DTRA’s recognition of our work further positions MeMed as a world leader in immune-based diagnostics of infectious diseases,” said Eran Eden, MeMed’s CEO. “This joint effort, and our growing collaboration with other international stakeholders from industry and government, will facilitate the global availability of our tests aimed at combating antimicrobial resistance.”
MeMed notes that in the past eight years, company co-founders Kfir Ovedand Eran Eden collaborated with researchers and clinicians to study the changes that take place in the human immune system when it is fighting infections, in order to develop a human immune signature that accurately recognizes the difference between bacterial and viral infections. ImmunoXpert, the first generation of this novel test, is already in use and has been validated in thousands of patients. The second generation of the test involved development of a new point-of-care platform that is easy to use and takes only fifteen minutes.
“This collaboration will allow us to expedite completion of our point of care platform program,” said Oved, MeMed’s CTO. “In addition to allowing measurements of our bacterial versus viral test within minutes, the new platform also opens the way to a variety of rapid multiplex-protein measurements at the point of care with lab-quality precision, which has broad applications.”
“The project will also evaluate and expand our test menu to detect early infections, even at the pre-symptomatic stage of a disease – currently a major challenge in our ability to control infections and epidemics”, said Tanya Gottlieb, MeMed’s VP Scientific Affairs.
This article is published courtesy of Homeland Security News Wire.
