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Immunexpress raising $40M; measures immune response to shave sepsis diagnostic time to one hour

Seattle diagnostics company Immunexpress is working to whittle sepsis screening time down to an hour – […]

Seattle diagnostics company Immunexpress is working to whittle sepsis screening time down to an hour – and is in the midst of a $40 million Series C to do so, CEO Roz Brandon says. Its approach is to measure a patient’s septic immune response – parting ways with the current norm of seeking out sepsis-causing pathogens in the blood.

Immunexpress is expecting that its first test, called SeptiCyte, will receive FDA clearance by the close of 2015. It’s currently ramping up for commercialization, and plans to use the C round to build out a sales and marketing force.

The product it’s commercializing in 2016 is a laboratory-based assay, with a turnaround time that’s just under four hours, Brandon says. But it’s got a fully automated diagnostic machine in the works that’ll shave that time to just one hour.

There’s a reason sepsis still carries such a high mortality rate: For every hour that passes before proper treatment’s administered, a patient’s risk for death rises 7.6 percent. It’s a wildly expensive disease – cost more than $20 billion in 2011 – and is considered the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., since 30 to 50 percent of those diagnosed die. Despite its prevalence, sepsis remains a remarkably tricky and time-consuming disease to diagnose – by the time a medical team knows that a patient has blood poisoning, it’s often too late for the appropriate treatment.

Brandon says one of the main failings of the current diagnostic protocol is that it relies on isolating pathogens in the blood that cause sepsis. The FDA just recently cleared a promising blood test that can detect sepsis-causing yeasts within an hour. But Brandon claims finding the pathogen in a blood sample’s like finding a needle in a haystack – and an immune response approach is far more reliable.

The SeptiCyte test – and a number of diagnostics still in the company’s pipeline – relies on quantifying a kaleidoscope of nucleic acid and protein expression markers biomarkers “that, in different combinations, answer specific clinical questions about sepsis,” the company says. “Patented biomarkers, algorithms and analysis methods are used to interpret information about the sepsis host response.”

Immunexpress was founded in 2006 in Australia, and then moved to Seattle in 2010. To date it’s raised about $40 million, Brandon says. It has an international roster of investors, including Swiss diagnostics maker Debiopharm and the Janssen family.

 

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