Molecular diagnostics company Akonni Biosystems reported on Wednesday the receipt of a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract to accelerate the advancement of its proprietary technologies to address the critically unmet need for simple affordable tools to diagnose lower respiratory diseases in children.
This SBIR contract (HHSN272201700063C) was awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), acute respiratory infections are the third leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for 4.2 million deaths annually, more than 40% of which are children under the age of five. Infectious respiratory pathogens include different types and species of bacteria, viruses, and fungi, many of which exhibit varying levels of drug-resistance, making it challenging to establish a definitive diagnosis and appropriate treatment.
In conjunction, the conventional diagnostic techniques require long turnaround times or lack the required sensitivity. Compounding the testing time and poor sensitivity issues is the limited ability to test for a variety of different respiratory pathogens simultaneously. Misdiagnosis presents several serious risks, public endangerment or the administration of inappropriate therapy, which is largely responsible for the increasing prevalence of drug-resistant strains, added the company.
The company said the commercial products in its near-term pipeline include rapid sample preparation technologies for nucleic acid extraction and multiplex panel assays for detecting clinically relevant genotypes for pharmacogenomics, human chronic diseases, and genotypes for infectious diseases, including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), upper respiratory infections, viral encephalitis and hospital-acquired infections (MRSA).
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