29 September 2020 - - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded US-based molecular diagnostics company Inflammatix up to USD 1.1m for further development of a rapid diagnostic that reads the immune system to predict severe respiratory failure risk in COVID-19 patients, the company said.

The diagnostic is being developed to help physicians make better hospital admission and resourcing decisions for COVID-19 patients at hospital presentation.

The Inflammatix approach known as host-response diagnostics rapidly reads the immune system using multiple mRNA biomarkers and a machine learning algorithm.

The company is developing other host-response diagnostic tests that identify the presence and type of infection (viral or bacterial), in addition to predicting the risk of severe disease, to enable physicians to make more informed decisions for patients with acute infection and sepsis.

The company's host-response diagnostic approach for predicting COVID-19 severity risk was shown to be superior to clinical biomarkers, including IL-6, in a new study presented last week at the 2020 European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection Diseases (ESCMID) Conference on Coronavirus Disease (ECCVID).

In this prospective study of 97 patients with PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia and blood drawn on the day of admission at ATTIKON University General Hospital in Athens, Greece, CoVerity demonstrated an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.88 (95% CI 0.81-0.95) for identifying patients who developed respiratory failure or died, independent of age, while IL-6 had an AUROC of 0.73 (95% CI 0.62 - 0.85).

The new classifier had the highest accuracy among all single biomarkers tested, including IL-6, procalcitonin, C-reactive protein, lactate, and SuPAR.

This agreement is part of DARPA's efforts to develop platform technologies that can be deployed safely and rapidly to provide the US population with near-immediate protection against emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological weapons, even in cases when the pathogen or infectious agent is unknown.

Inflammatix is a molecular diagnostics company that is reimagining diagnostics by reading the patient's immune system to deliver rapid results that improve patient care and reduce major public health burdens.

The company's initial focus is on acute infections and sepsis, where its tests combine proprietary biomarkers and advanced machine learning to help physicians quickly get the right treatments to the right patients.

Future tests will be developed to run on the company's sample-to-answer isothermal instrument platform, Myrna, in under 30 minutes, enabling the power of precision medicine at the point of care.

The Burlingame, Calif.-based company is funded by leading medical technology investors including Khosla Ventures, Northpond Ventures, the Stanford StartX Fund, Think.Health Ventures and OSF Ventures.