MeMed Ltd, Tirat Carmel, Israel, has been awarded a contract by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a branch of the US Department of Defense. The contract, totaling up to $9.2 million, will fund the completion of MeMed’s point-of-care platform for distinguishing bacterial from viral infections.
Eran Eden, PhD, MeMed.
“We are excited by this vote of confidence. DTRA’s recognition of our work further positions MeMed as a world leader in immune-based diagnostics of infectious diseases,” says Eran Eden, PhD, CEO of MeMed. “This joint effort, and our growing collaboration with other international stakeholders from industry and government, will facilitate the global availability of our tests aimed at combating antimicrobial resistance.”
In the past 8 years, company cofounders Kfir Oved, MD, PhD, and Eden collaborated with researchers and clinicians from around the globe to study the changes that take place in the human immune system when it is fighting infections, in order to develop a human immune signature that accurately recognizes the difference between bacterial and viral infections. ImmunoXpert, the first generation of this novel test, is already in use and has been validated in thousands of patients. The second generation of the test involved development of a new point-of-care platform that takes 15 minutes.
Kfir Oved, MD, MeMed.
“This collaboration will allow us to expedite completion of our point-of-care platform program,” says Oved, chief technology officer at MeMed. “In addition to allowing measurements of our bacterial versus viral test within minutes, the new platform also opens the way to a variety of rapid multiplex-protein measurements at the point of care with lab-quality precision, which has broad applications.”
“The project will also evaluate and expand our test menu to detect early infections, even at the presymptomatic stage of a disease—currently a major challenge in our ability to control infections and epidemics,” says Tanya Gottlieb, PhD, vice president of scientific affairs at MeMed.
For more information, visit MeMed.
