US-based molecular diagnostics company Inflammatix has secured $57m in a Series E financing round, led by Khosla Ventures and Think.Health.
Other participants in the funding round include Northpond Ventures, D1 Capital Partners, Iberis Capital, Vesalius BioCapital, OSF Healthcare, and RAW Ventures, among others.
The Series E round brings Inflammatix’s total investment to more than $200m, in addition to more than $50m in grants and contracts from various government agencies and foundations.
Inflammatix intends to use the funds to support the regulatory filing and early commercialisation of its lead product, the TriVerity Acute Infection and Sepsis Test System.
Inflammatix CEO and co-founder Timothy Sweeney said: “The newly raised funds will help us to expand our commercial team and plan clinical interventional and health economic studies as we await FDA clearance over the coming months.
“TriVerity is bringing the promise of machine learning and AI to infection and sepsis care. We hope to help hospitals improve their performance in terms of complying with sepsis detection and treatment protocols and optimizing patient throughput.”
Khosla Ventures partner Alex Morgan said: “TriVerity takes a novel approach by detecting the RNA changes that occur in immune cells prior to the manifestation of disease, enabling clinicians to respond faster and sometimes before physiological symptoms are even present.”
Inflammatix’s TriVerity system is a blood test that runs on Myrna Instrument, the company’s in-house, cartridge-based, benchtop analyser.
The test is designed to simultaneously determine the presence of an infection, and the likeliness of a patient needing ICU-level interventions.
TriVerity can measure 29 messenger RNAs (mRNAs) to rapidly read the body’s immune response to infection using machine learning-derived algorithms.
It detects the presence of infection and the risk of its progression to severe illness, in adult patients with suspected acute infection or sepsis in the emergency department setting.
Also, the test helps physicians in making treatment decisions, selecting antimicrobial therapy, administering additional diagnostic testing, and whether to admit or discharge the patient.
The Myrna Instrument is capable of multiplex sample-to-answer quantitation of mRNAs in about 30 minutes, with less than one minute of operator hands-on time and simple maintenance.
