MicroPhage, Inc. announced it closed its most recent round of financing last week. This round brings the company’s total capital raised to $12M and included both new and existing investors (RockyRadar is trying to track down more specifics on the most recent round). Regardless of the exact details, closing financing in the current economic climate is a significant accomplishment. Microphage plans to apply the proceeds to complete validation and launch their initial product in late 2009.
MicroPhage’s initial diagnostic product identifies Staphylococcus aureus (staph) bloodstream infections and determines antibiotic resistance and susceptibility within five hours. Staph infections are a significant problem, particularly in hospitals, resulting in over 400,000 deaths per year. With current technology it takes 48-72 hours to identify the staph resistance profile, meaning patients face two plus days of treatment with broad-based antibiotics which may be both ineffective and contributory to the proliferation of drug-resistant strains. The hope of Microphage is to reduce current staph profile identification time by over 90%, potentially saving tens of thousands of lives every year.
The completion of the funding round comes just a few weeks after MicroPhage made several presentations about its staph test at the Interscience Conference on Anti-microbial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC). The company reported strong specificity and sensitivity data with a 93% detection rate and accurate methicillin-resistance determination 98% of the time. In presentations, the company also noted ease of use as another expected benefit of the test. The test consists of two incubation tubes for blood samples into which two dipstick-like detectors are inserted after five hours – one to identify staph and the other to determine antibiotic susceptibility.
The underlying technology behind Michrophage’s tests can be found seeded in the second part of the company’s name – phages, viruses that multiply aggressively when exposed to target bacteria. The company, based in Longmont, CO is seeking to use its proprietary adaptation of bacteriophage amplification technology to identify bacterial infections and determine antibiotic susceptibility for hospital acquired infections. For more information see the company’s press release.
