Creating a quicker, cheaper and more accurate way for doctors to test patients for urinary tract infections has netted a St. Louis startup at least $2 million in its latest round of fundraising.
Medical device company BacterioScan disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had raised $2.1 million of a $6 million round from 20 investors.
The first device the company has developed aims to reduce lab costs, cut diagnostic delay and curb excessive use of antibiotics for urinary tract infections, the most common hospital-acquired infection that also occurs in up to half of all women.
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It’s a benchtop instrument for hospital labs that use electro-optic technology to screen urine samples without the use of reagents or the need to be sent to a lab. It reduces physician wait time for results to less than three hours. The gold standard for UTI diagnosis is currently a urine culture, which can take a few days to produce results. Dipstick tests are quicker and sufficient to exclude infection, but they are prone to giving false positive results.
On its website, BacterioScan says its first product is poised for 510(k) submission and clearance in the first quarter of 2014.
The three-year-old company, which also received a seed investment earlier this year from investors part of the Arch Angels network, appears to be using technology that originated in Israel. President Dana Marshall is managing director at Warson Capital Partners and was the founder and president of laser technology company Cutting Edge Optronics, which sold to TRW in 2000.
