NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Australian molecular diagnostics company Immunexpress Group today announced a A$982,707 (US$888,101) grant that it will use to further develop its PCR-based test for sepsis.
The grant comes from Commercialisation Australia, an Australian government initiative, and will go toward Immunexpress' A$2.2 million project to bring its whole blood qRT-PCR test called SeptiCyte Plus to market. The assay is for diagnosing sepsis "within a clinically relevant timeframe," the company said.
The grant along with other existing cash resources will be used by Immunexpress to develop the SeptiCyte Plus prototype through to a laboratory-developed test and to make it available to hospital laboratories in two unnamed "large health systems" in the US and a major academic hospital in Germany, the company said. It anticipates using the data collected from the centers to inform the regulatory pathway and medical device application for the test in the US.
"Based on the results to date, SeptiCyte Plus has the potential to make an important impact on the healthcare community and improve patient outcomes by allowing for earlier diagnosis and targeted antimicrobial treatment within a clinically relevant timeframe of [less than] three hours," Immunexpress President and CEO Roslyn Brandon said in a statement.
The firm's SeptiCyte technology quantifies specific and multiple molecular biomarkers from a patient's immune system for "earlier diagnosis, detection triage, screening, severity assessment, and ultimately for better timing and targeting of drug and other therapies," Immunexpress said.
In 2012, Immunexpress, Biocartis, and Debiopharm Group forged a collaboration aimed at developing Immunexpress' SeptiCyte-based assays.