US-based infectious disease diagnostics developer Day Zero Diagnostics (DZD) has closed a $16m financing round to complete the development of an improved Blood2Bac sample preparation diagnostic.
With the latest financing, the total funds raised by the company reached $49m in venture capital funding and over $18m in non-dilutive funding.
DZD is developing this sequencing-based diagnostic that can identify bacterial and fungal pathogens as well as ascertain their antimicrobial susceptibility in less than eight hours.
The company will also use the proceeds from the funding round to speed up the development of a prototype for the commercial system, including both the hardware systems and the Keynome lineup of cloud-based artificial intelligence algorithms.
Besides providing high-accuracy organism ID, the advancements also facilitate antimicrobial susceptibility profiling.
This diagnostic is claimed to help hospitals save patients’ lives, reduce their length of stay and minimise the overuse of toxic, expensive and ineffective antibiotics.
Day Zero Diagnostics co-founder and Massachusetts General Hospital’s physician for infectious disease Dr Douglas Kwon said: “No other company has solved the scientific and technical challenges required to make rapid ID and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling possible in such a short time.
“Physicians understand that the real enemy in treating serious systemic infections is time and we need reliable, comprehensive diagnostic information to inform clinical decision-making far sooner than is possible today.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), antimicrobial resistance causes nearly five million deaths per year globally.
The present testing approaches take days to yield results and according to a study, a delay in time is linked to an 8% increase in death per hour.
Day Zero Diagnostics CEO and co-founder Jong Lee said: “DZD is focused on bringing an FDA-cleared diagnostic to market that will deliver the ‘holy grail’ of infectious disease diagnostics – same-day organism identification and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling directly from clinical samples and our investors share our belief in the game-changing nature of our technology.”