Grant will enable Nanogen to develop improved molecular biological methods, miniaturise those methods, and demonstrate this new molecular diagnostic approach in a hospital laboratory setting
Nanogen, a developer of diagnostic products, reports that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded the company a grant of $2.5 million over the next five years for a research project to develop a prototype fully integrated diagnostic system for clinical labs to identify infectious agents that cause sepsis and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP).
The grant will enable Nanogen to develop improved molecular biological methods, miniaturise those methods, and demonstrate the performance of this new molecular diagnostic approach to diagnose sepsis and CAP in a hospital laboratory setting.
Full laboratory work-ups to specifically determine the cause of sepsis or pneumonia from the large number of possible disease-causing bacterial and viral agents is time consuming and expensive.
In addition, broad spectrum antibiotics, which may not effectively treat patients, are often administered while awaiting test results.
Nanogen will be using its proprietary chemistry and multiplex detection technologies and employing the Medical College of Wisconsin's technologies and clinical and microbiological expertise.
The goal of this partnership is to develop an automated diagnostic system that would be able to rapidly detect a number of bacteria and viruses that cause sepsis and pneumonia in patients.
"In previous government grant programmes, Nanogen greatly reduced the size of its instrument and integrated essential biological sample preparation, amplification and detection technologies to design a sample-to-answer diagnostic system," said Howard Birndorf, Nanogen's chairman and CEO.
"This NIAID/NIH research programme will further the design of a sophisticated prototype assay and instrument system and sepsis and pneumonia detection panels to help physicians expedite test results in the hospital lab and make better treatment decisions".
Mortality from sepsis can range from 28 to 50%.
In addition, pneumonia remains the seventh leading cause of death in the USA.
Estimates of the incidence of CAP range from 4 to 5 million cases per year.
Early identification and appropriate treatment of the underlying cause of sepsis and pneumonia will improve patient outcomes.
Nanogen's advanced diagnostics provide researchers, clinicians, physicians and patients worldwide with improved methods and tests that can predict, diagnose and ultimately help treat disease.
Nanogen's products include real-time PCR reagents, the NanoChip molecular biology workstation platform for molecular diagnostic applications, and its line of rapid point-of-care diagnostic tests.
Nanogen's ten years of pioneering research involving nanotechnology may also have future applications in medical diagnostics, biowarfare, and other industries.
