NEW YORK — Belgian molecular diagnostics software developer UgenTec said today that it has received a €490,000 ($550,000) grant from the Flemish government's Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) to develop an infectious disease monitoring and prediction platform.
UgenTec said it will use the funding to support a three-year partnership with Hasselt University focused on developing tools for quality monitoring and laboratory management reporting, as well as tools for real-time monitoring and predictive modeling of respiratory infections based on the company's flagship FastFinder PCR diagnostics software platform.
The work will be conducted in collaboration with three Belgian hospitals — OLV Hospital, AZ Sint-Jan, Jessa Hospital — which are current commercial users of the FastFinder software.
"This grant enables our vision on how our platform can benefit not just individual labs, but serve as a tool for better healthcare management and provide tools for managing population health risks such as outbreaks," UgenTec CEO Steven Verhoeven said in a statement. "Commercially, these innovations are highly relevant as we're convinced that predictive modeling will help large diagnostic enterprises to better run their operations and pharmaceutical companies to improve their production processes."
UgenTec, which raised $9.3 million in Series A funding in early 2018, recently began offering software that uses artificial intelligence-based machine learning for end-point PCR analysis.