MeMed Ltd, Tirat Carmel, Israel, has been awarded a $4,079,159 grant from the US Department of Defense’s congressionally directed medical research programs (CDMRP). The award will support transition of the company’s prototype point-of-care (POC) platform into a final product, including transfer to manufacturing and implementation of Cloud connectivity.
The CDMRP grant complements a $9.2 million contract awarded to MeMed last year by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency. That contract is supporting the final stages of prototype development.
Kfir Oved, MD, MeMed.
“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,” says Kfir Oved, MD, PhD, chief technology officer at MeMed.
MeMed recently announced the completion of a trio of clinical studies that collectively enrolled 2,376 patients over the past 7 years.1–3 The latest Pathfinder study independently confirmed that MeMed’s novel blood test accurately distinguishes between bacterial and viral infections in children. The test aims to support clinicians in one of the most routine yet challenging clinical dilemmas—determining whether an infection is bacterial or viral in order to decide whether to treat with antibiotics.
Eran Eden, PhD, MeMed.
“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 systemic inflammatory response syndrome,” says Eran Eden, PhD, chief executive of MeMed. “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.”
For more information, visit MeMed.
REFERENCES
- Oved K, Cohen A, Boico O, et al. A novel host-proteome signature for distinguishing between acute bacterial and viral infections. PLoS One. 2015;10(3):e0120012; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120012.
- Van Houten CB, de Groot JAH, Klein A, et al. A host-protein based assay to differentiate between bacterial and viral infections in preschool children (Opportunity): a double-blind, multicenter validation Lancet Infect Dis. 2017;17(4):431–440; doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(16)30519-9.
- Srugo I, Klein A, Stein M, et al. Validation of a novel assay to distinguish bacterial and viral. Pediatrics. 2017;140(4):e20163453; doi: 10.1542/peds.2016-3453.
