NEW YORK – UK Ministry of Defence spinout Presymptom Health announced Thursday that it has raised £1.5M ($1.9 million) in follow-on seed and grant funding to support product development and clinical trials of its sepsis and infection diagnostics platform.
The funding will also accelerate time to market for the products, the company said in a statement. Presymptom Health plans to obtain UK Conformity Assessment (UKCA) accreditation of its first product in mid-2025 followed by rollout to the National Health Service.
Presymptom Health has been developing host-response assays that use PCR platforms to detect RNA biomarkers of infection. The technology leverages insights from machine learning and AI analytics applied to a 72,000-sample biobank to detect infection and sepsis in patients up to three days before symptoms appear, according to the firm's website.
"We're confident that our first product can play a big part in tackling antimicrobial resistance, which has been identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top 10 global public health threats," said Presymptom Health CEO Iain Miller.
The technology is currently undergoing clinical trials at nine NHS hospitals in the UK with results anticipated this year, the company said, adding it is working on additional UK and European Union trials.
Presymptom Health said it will initially roll out the test in the UK but has plans to bring the product to the US and other regions in coming years.
The technology was created by scientists working at government laboratories and spun from the UK Ministry of Defence in 2019 with support from Ploughshare, the tech transfer unit of the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.
Similar host-response technologies to rapidly diagnose sepsis include the US Food and Drug Administration-cleared SeptiCyte Rapid test from Immunexpress and Inflammatix's TriVerity Acute Infection and Sepsis Test System, which was granted breakthrough device designation by the FDA late last year.