Summary: Fluxergy is collaborating with NIAID to enhance molecular testing and sample preparation on its innovative platform, targeting affordable and accessible point-of-care diagnostics for STIs and vaginosis.
Takeaways:
- Advancing Molecular Testing: Under NIAID’s preclinical services, Fluxergy will optimize rapid nucleic acid extraction and purification methods to develop high-sensitivity molecular tests for gram-negative and fungal pathogens.
- Improving STI and Vaginosis Care: The Fluxergy Platform aims to simplify workflows and lower diagnostic costs, addressing inadequate STI treatment and reducing antimicrobial resistance.
- Revolutionizing Point-of-Care Testing: With its multimodal capabilities, Fluxergy’s platform combines multiple test modalities into a single, cost-effective device, making lab-quality diagnostics accessible in resource-limited healthcare settings.
Fluxergy, an Irvine-based medical diagnostic company re-envisioning point-of-care testing with a cost-effective, all-in-one multimodal diagnostic platform, will utilize in-kind Diagnostics Development Services from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to advance molecular testing and sample preparation capabilities on the Fluxergy Platform.
Advancing Molecular Testing and Sample Preparation
Under NIAID’s suite of preclinical services, NIAID-funded contractors will evaluate rapid nucleic acid extraction and purification methods compatible with the Fluxergy Test Card, with the goal of achieving high sensitivity, sample-to-answer molecular tests to be developed for gram-negative and fungal pathogens that cause sexually transmitted infections and bacterial and fungal vaginosis. These integrated extraction capabilities will be required for the development of Fluxergy’s sexually transmitted infection (STI) test and comprehensive vaginosis test.
“Fluxergy has had several successful collaborations with the United States Government, including our recent award from JPEO through the Henry Jackson Foundation for the development of a multimodal host-based early sepsis detection test,” says Tej Patel, Fluxergy CEO. “This agreement with NIAID will allow us to accelerate progress toward commercialization of a full menu of easy-to-use, cost-effective, and lab-quality tests of the Fluxergy Platform to address significant accessibility and affordability issues with point-of-care diagnostics available today.”
Many healthcare providers use syndromic management to diagnose and prescribe treatment to patients, leading to inadequate treatment or eventual antimicrobial resistance. By simplifying the workflow and lowering the cost of testing, point-of-care diagnostics can provide a solution to these current issues in STI management.
This announcement follows the news of a previous partnership launched earlier this year for Fluxergy. In January, the company announced they had formally partnered with Austere environments Consortium for Enhanced Sepsis Outcomes (ACESO) through a grant administered by The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Inc. (HJF) to evaluate the feasibility of bringing rapid sepsis results to resource-limited settings.
What is Fluxergy
Fluxergy is determined to be the first diagnostic company to effectively replace traditional lab testing with point-of-care (POC) testing through the multimodal Fluxergy Platform, according to the company. Access to POC testing can positively impact the quality of care provided by clinicians, especially in decentralized and lower-resource healthcare settings that cannot perform diagnostic tests in-house.
Adoption of current POC platforms has been limited by their high instrument and test costs, concerns about non-laboratory personnel accurately and reproducibly performing this mode of testing, and the modality limitations of current POC platforms only being able to perform one type of testing.
The Fluxergy Platform can overcome these limitations by combining the test modalities (molecular, immunochemistry, clinical chemistry, and hematology) required to perform the most common blood and infectious disease tests into a single instrument. Fluxergy can enable healthcare providers with one device for all common test orders at an affordable price point.