QuantaLife disclosed this week the full amount of a five-year grant that it has recently been awarded to develop microdroplet PCR-based point-of-care tests to detect methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
The award, administered by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, is worth a total of approximately $6 million over the five-year period of the grant, the company said this week.
Last month, a National Institutes of Health database published details of the award, but only disclosed funding for the first year of the grant (PCR Insider 8/26/2010).
QuantaLife said this week that the grant will allow it to "broaden its product pipeline" to build a platform for detecting MRSA. The company plans to perform clinical testing in collaboration with the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
The company is developing an instrument system for droplet digital PCR, or ddPCR, which it expects to "provide accurate test results with reduced analysis time, complexity, and cost thereby making nucleic acid amplification tests viable near point of care," according to the grant abstract.
Ben Hindson, chief science officer at Quantalife, said in a statement that the award "provides independent validation" of the ddPCR platform "and will accelerate the development of our next-generation diagnostic platform."