The way we diagnose urinary tract infections is still pretty belabored. The most common method is examining a urine sample for errant bacteria or blood cells. Other methods include a urine sample and then trying to grow the bacteria in the lab, or having CT scan of your bladder – quite the to-do for a bacterial infection as exceedingly common as the UTI. Some 8.1 million doc appointments each year are because of an infected urinary tract – and the patients are sent home with a routine course of antibiotics.
St. Louis-based startup Bacterioscan says it can reduce processing time from several days to less than two hours – in some cases 20 minutes – with its new in-vitro diagnostic tool that’s slated for launch in 2015. And it can detect antibiotic resistance in these bacteria, which is becoming a dangerous problem for the simple UTI.
To do so, the company just closed out its Series A round that it says was oversubscribed. While Bacterioscan didn’t disclose how much was raised, last year it began fundraising for a $6 million round; at the time, it had just brought in about $2 million.
The company’s device, first developed in Israel, rapidly quantifies bacterial growth in a liquid. It’s already sold a few of its “research only” early models to research institutions, the company says, adding:
Today this instrument is at work in several world-class research hospitals and universities examining its capability to rapidly detect antibiotic resistance and susceptibility in various types of bacterial infections. Initial work, including recent publication from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and others, has indicated that the technology can reduce the time for selection of effective antibiotic therapy from 30+ hours to less than 3 hours, offering a potential breakthrough in addressing the worldwide urgent challenge of antibiotic resistance.
The financing round was managed by Warson Capital Partners, and included co-investments from both the Missouri Technology Corporation and BioGenerator Fund. Read more about Bacterioscan’s pipeline here.
