On the heels of Illumina‘s recent announcement that it is developing a pan-cancer diagnostic, Washington, D.C.-based metagenomics startup CosmosID is making similar strides – but in the microbial pathogen diagnostics space.
The company’s taking an in silico approach to broad microbial characterization: It has a curated library of some 65,000 viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites that it says can identify in a prepared sample – in minutes.
CosmosID just raised a $6 million Series B round. It’ll use the funding to scale its microbial detection platform, and grow its software team and sales staff, CEO Manoj Dadlani said in a phone interview.
CosmosID says in a matter of minutes it can process a huge amount of sequencing data, and turn it into actionable information for pathologists. Notably, the company says it can diagnose polymicrobial infections – pinpointing numerous pathogens in a sample that can contribute to, say, an illness.
The company uses an efficient algorithm that maps against a curated database of microbial genomic information. Dadlani says the system’s been validated in some 20,000 biological samples. It has the ability to detect low levels of pathogens in samples, because of its database contains a large number of biomarkers for the organisms.
A real-world application of CosmosID’s platform was just published in PNAS – diagnosing mixed infection that leads to necrotizing fascitis. The company plans to publish several more papers that validate its approach this year, Dadlani said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“The founding of the company is based on very extensive knowledge and research in microbial systematics, going back 20 to 30 years,” said Dr. Rita Colwell, a molecular microbiology professor at University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. “This is not something that comes out of the novelty of present metagenomics – but in fact is based on very intense systematics. We’ve taken the time verify and validate the fact that we’re rapid, accurate, and provide precise, actionable answers – information a physician could use to make a diagnosis.”
Notably, Colwell was director of the National Science Foundation from 1998 to 2004 and was the 2006 recipient of the National Medal of Science. She founded the company in 2008. Previously, the in silico diagnostics startup raised $4 million in funding from Battelle; this current round comes from Applied Value Group, former Sony Ericson CEO Bert Nordberg and former Blackberry COO Kristian Tear.
CosmosID has a contract with the Food and Drug Administration to conduct food safety testing. It says it’s working with pharmaceutical companies to analyze microbiome modulators – generating revenue doing so – and is building relationships with genomics companies that’ll be announced in the next few months.
Much of its R&D, which it’ll bulk up with the new funding round, is to correlate genotype to phenotype when examining microbial pathogens.
“Our algorithm and platform are very computationally light,” Dadlani said. “We’re able to run the platform on a laptop without an internet connection, which allows for various field applications.”
