NEW YORK – The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation on Wednesday announced that it has invested $7.0 million in Alzheimer's disease diagnostic company C2N Diagnostics.
The investment from the ADDF's Diagnostics Accelerator will be used to develop a deployable version of C2N's blood biomarker detection platform to enable global access to the firm's PrecivityAD blood test. The mass spectrometry-based assay measures plasma Aβ 42/40 ratio and apolipoprotein E protein to determine whether a person is likely to have the presence of amyloid plaques in the brain that are characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. The firm's updated PrecivityAD2 test determines and combines the Aβ 42/40 ratio with plasma p-tau 217/unphosphorylated tau 217 ratio to improve performance for identifying people with amyloid pathology.
"PTau217 has emerged as the blood-based biomarker gold standard for diagnostic purposes, and studies show that C2N's PrecivityAD2 test has industry-leading sensitivity and accuracy, positioning these tests to replace more invasive PET scans and spinal taps," ADDF Cofounder and CSO Howard Fillit said in a statement. "This investment will improve this critical tool's accessibility, a pillar of the DxA's mission to develop diagnostics for the millions of patients living with this disease."
C2N CEO and Cofounder Joel Braunstein added that the firm is "intensely focused on our goal to develop an end-to-end clinical mass spectrometry solution."
"This platform will enable high-performance Alzheimer's disease testing on a global scale," Braunstein said in a statement. "C2N believes a decentralized process for high-performance testing, developed and qualified in a regulatory-compliant manner, is a requisite to address the growing global demand for early and accurate disease detection."
The firm's PrecivityAD test received CE marking in 2020.