NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – InSilixa announced yesterday that it has received a $1.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a point-of-care molecular diagnostic test for the rapid detection and profiling of antibiotic-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
The test will be based on InSilixa's proprietary complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) biochip technology, which is designed to detect pathogens in clinical samples and simultaneously identify their drug-resistance profiles using highly multiplexed targeted DNA sequencing.
According to the company, the test will check hundreds of known tuberculosis mutations and perform a comprehensive multi-drug resistance test for up to five key antibiotics in less than an hour.
InSilixa is also developing the CMOS biochips for the detection of other multi-drug resistant bacteria and for the detection, quantification, and characterization of HIV in blood samples.