Funding to Enable Continued Development of Precision Metagenomics Advancing Platform. Read more at Yahoo! Finance.
IDbyDNA, the company revolutionizing the use of Precision Metagenomics, has been awarded a second year of funding by MRIGlobal to continue participation in the “Detect It with Gene Editing Technologies” (DIGET) program for the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). IDbyDNA is in collaboration with Mammoth Biosciences, Draper Laboratory, University of California-San Francisco and Toolbox Medical Innovations on the MRIGlobal-led team. As part of this initiative, IDbyDNA is contributing to the development of a massively multiplexed device to provide the military with rapid infectious disease testing for potential use in diagnostics and biosurveillance.
“We are excited by the progress we’ve made to-date and this second round of support will allow further development of capabilities that focus on analyzing more complex data,” said Neil Gunn, CEO of IDbyDNA. “Our goal is to leverage our expertise in precision metagenomics to produce a durable, next-generation device that is battlefield tested and ready for more robust and improved diagnostic testing of infectious disease threats, including emerging pathogens.”
A goal of the program is to develop a lab-based massively multiplexed detection (MMD) platform capable of screening clinical and environmental samples for more than 1,000 targets simultaneously. CRISPR-based assays detect the presence of genome sequences. IDbyDNA’s bioinformatic expertise provides analysis with an easy-to-use interface and software that powers the data analytics to determine what pathogens are present. Tapping into the power and breadth of IDbyDNA’s analytics pipeline, thousands of pathogen detection results can be processed nearly instantaneously. The intuitive device interface allows the user to quickly initiate testing and easily review results without formal training in microbiology.