NEW YORK – Molecular diagnostic firm Inflammatix announced Tuesday it has received up to $1.1 million from the US Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to further develop a rapid diagnostic to predict risk of severe respiratory failure in patients with COVID-19.
The company's CoVerity COVID-19 Severity test is being developed to help clinicians make hospital admission and resourcing decisions. Its host-response diagnostics technology reads the immune system with a machine learning algorithm and 5 mRNA biomarkers.
The mRNA classifier for the test was developed on a training set of more than 20 clinical studies, Inflammatix CEO and Cofounder Tim Sweeney said in a statement. A study presented last week at the 2020 European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection Diseases Conference on Coronavirus Disease found Inflammatix's approach was "superior to clinical biomarkers, including IL-6," the company said.
Burlingame, California-based Inflammatix is also developing other tests to identify the presence and type of infection for patients with acute infections and sepsis.