NEW YORK – Avails Medical announced on Thursday that it has been awarded an additional $1.7 million in funding from the Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, or CARB-X, to develop a rapid antibiotic susceptibility (AST) test device.
The Menlo Park, California company has developed an electrical biosensor-based AST testing technology called eAST that yields results in approximately five hours. The firm was granted $2.5 million from CARB-X last year, with the potential for up to $14.7 million upon successful completion of milestones.
"The Avails eAST diagnostic platform offers a very practical solution to reducing time to actionable AST results, which is critical in guiding antibiotic therapy decisions, especially in hospital centers that are human-resource constrained," Erin Duffy, chief of research and development at CARB-X, said in a statement.
Eszter Deak, director of scientific and medical affairs at Avails Medical, noted that time is a critical element in caring for sepsis cases.
"Avails' unique rapid eAST technology presents a meaningful opportunity to improve patient care by shortening the time to effective antibiotics at an affordable cost," Deak said.
CARB-X is a global nonprofit partnership based at Boston University School of Law and dedicated to funding the development of new antibiotics, vaccines, diagnostics, and other products to address the rising global threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.