By Diagnostics World Staff
February 6, 2018 | MeMed announced today that it has been awarded a $4,079,159 grant by the DoD’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP). The award will support transition of the prototype point-of-care (POC) platform towards a final product, including transfer to manufacturing and implementation of cloud connectivity. The CDMRP grant complements a $9.2M contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency awarded last year to MeMed that is supporting the final stages of prototype development.
“This grant will allow us to set up manufacturing processes for our POC platform, ultimately enabling MeMed’s novel blood test that has been clinically validated for differentiating between bacterial and viral infection to reach the patient in a shorter time," said Kfir Oved, MeMed’s CTO, in a press release.
MeMed recently announced completion of a trilogy of clinical studies, two of which were double-blind, conducted over the past seven years, which collectively enrolled 2,376 patients. The latest study, PATHFINDER, published in the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, independently confirmed that MeMed’s novel blood test, accurately distinguishes between bacterial and viral infections in children. Coverage of the study was published in Diagnostics World.
The test aims to support clinicians in one of the most routine yet challenging clinical dilemmas today – determining whether an infection is bacterial or viral in order to decide whether to treat or not to treat with antibiotics.
"Now that development is approaching completion, we are working to expand the menu of tests that will be available on the POC platform, including novel tests for predicting disease severity and for differentiating between sepsis and SIRS,” Eran Eden, MeMed’s CEO, said in a written statement following the announcement. “Fast menu expansion is possible, as our unique platform paves the way to performing a wide range of other multiplex-protein measurements, with laboratory quality, within minutes at the POC – the basis for a panel of tests needed to advance patient care."