NEW YORK – Alzheimer's disease testing firm C2N Diagnostics said Monday that it has received a $15 million program-related investment from the GHR Foundation to support the development of tests for assessing tau tangle pathology.
The new tests will measure blood-based tau biomarkers including MTBR-tau, offering a possible alternative to PET imaging for aiding in diagnosis and staging of Alzheimer's disease and in the development of therapeutic targeting of tau pathology.
Along with amyloid plaques, tau tangles are a characteristic component of Alzheimer's disease and are believed to play an important role in its progression.
"Our innovative, precision medicine-focused work has already galvanized the science, the research, and the platform for developing and commercializing novel diagnostics. Now, we’re poised to add tests for tau-based blood biomarkers to our Alzheimer’s disease testing portfolio," C2N CEO Joel Braunstein said in a statement.
"C2N’s tests are establishing a new gold standard for Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis," GHR Chair and CEO Amy Rauenhorst Goldman said in a statement. "We are confident in C2N’s efforts to tackle tau detection in the blood to achieve a more comprehensive picture of Alzheimer’s pathology at any stage of disease."
GHR also provided funding to support development of C2N's Alzheimer's blood test PrecivityAD2, which detects the presence of the brain amyloid pathology characteristic of Alzheimer's. With the new funding, GHR has provided C2N with $50 million since 2020.
The funds follow C2N's announcement last week of an investment of up to $7 million from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation’s (ADDF) Diagnostics Accelerator initiative to support C2N's efforts to develop a fully automated mass spectrometry system for running its tests.