Inflammatix Announces $32 Million in Series C Funding
Financing will be used to advance HostDx™ tests for acute infections and sepsis to commercial launch in 2021
BURLINGAME, Calif., Jan. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Inflammatix, a pioneering molecular diagnostics company delivering precision medicine at the point of care, today announced a $32 million Series C financing. The funding round included participation from existing investors Khosla Ventures, Northpond Ventures and Think.Health Ventures, and new investors that include Grey Sky Venture Partners. The funds will be used to advance Inflammatix's rapid HostDx™ tests through commercial launch in Europe and submission to the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2021.
"We are pleased to have the support of this strong group of healthcare investors who share our excitement about leveraging the immune response to build novel precision diagnostics for infectious and inflammatory disease. In particular, our first tests will help tackle antibiotic resistance and sepsis, two critical public health challenges, by reading the patient's host-immune response to infection," said Tim Sweeney, M.D., Ph.D., cofounder and chief executive officer of Inflammatix. "With this financing in hand, we look forward to bringing our rapid HostDx tests into hospitals and clinics so that physicians can quickly get the right treatments to the right patients."
The Series C funding follows an announcement in November 2019 that the company had signed a long-term cost-sharing contract to develop its tests for acute infections and sepsis with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) worth up $72 million based on achieving certain milestones.*
Antibiotic resistance and sepsis cause more than 700,000 and 5 million deaths worldwide each year, respectively. Traditional methods for diagnosing acute infections are too slow and are often inaccurate because they only look for pathogens in the bloodstream, despite most infections never entering the bloodstream. As a result, patients with suspected infection are often blindly treated with antibiotics – contributing to antibiotic resistance – or sepsis can be missed altogether.
Inflammatix's HostDx Sepsis and HostDx Fever tests use proprietary machine learning algorithms that incorporate the expression of multiple immune genes (host response) to identify the presence of bacterial or viral infections and to determine if a patient has or is likely to develop sepsis. Inflammatix's simple-to-use, sample-to-answer HostDx system is designed to produce results at or near the point of care in 30 minutes or less.
"Inflammatix's team is advancing our knowledge of how to use the immune system and immune responses to improve the diagnosis of acute infections and sepsis," said Mike Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of Northpond Ventures. "We believe their innovations in data science expertise and rapid multiplex test system have the power to transform care across a spectrum of medical conditions and diseases."
About Inflammatix
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 infection and sepsis, where its HostDx™ tests combine proprietary biomarkers and advanced machine learning to help physicians quickly get the right treatments to the right patients. Each test will be developed to run on the company's sample-to-answer isothermal instrument platform in under 30 minutes, enabling the power of precision medicine at the point of care. The Burlingame, Calif.-based company funders include Khosla Ventures, Northpond Ventures, Think.Health Ventures, Grey Sky Venture Partners and the Stanford-StartX Fund. For more information, please visit www.inflammatix.com and follow the company on Twitter (@Inflammatix_Inc).
*This project has been funded in part with Federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services; Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, under Contract Nos. 75A50119C00034 and 75A50119C00044.
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SOURCE Inflammatix
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