NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – T2 Biosystems today announced an agreement with Canon US Life Sciences to jointly develop a diagnostic test panel for rapid detection of Lyme disease on the T2MR platform.
Under the terms of the agreement, T2 will receive total payments from Canon of $8.5 million, which includes an upfront payment of $2 million and additional milestone payments upon achieving certain developmental and regulatory milestones. T2 will retain exclusive worldwide commercialization rights of any products developed out of the collaboration, including sales, marketing, and distribution, while Canon will receive royalty payments on all product sales resulting from the collaboration.
The firms also will explore working together on additional diagnostic products in the future, T2 said in a statement.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 30,000 cases of Lyme disease, a tick-borne bacterial infection that can cause chronic joint inflammation, neurological disorders, and cognitive defects, are diagnosed each year. However, the number of people affected could be more than 10 times higher, as the disease is under-reported due to poor diagnostic testing, said T2. Approximately 3.4 million tests are run for Lyme disease each year, the firm added.
"[B]lood culture is the current gold standard for testing patients suspected to have Lyme disease, but has many limitations, including often taking weeks to diagnose," T2 CEO John McDonough said in a statement. "We believe T2MR may be able to provide accurate results in hours instead of weeks, which could positively impact outcomes for patients and reduce the cost of Lyme disease to the healthcare system."
T2's Candida test for fungal infections causing sepsis was approved by the FDA in September 2014. It uses the same T2MR platform that the Lyme disease test will utilize and is also meant to replace blood culture as the standard of care.