Avisa Pharma, which is developing a breath test to detect respiratory diseases like pneumonia, COPD and tuberculosis, is raising a small debt round. The New Mexico upstart has raised $914,359 of a potential $2 million, according to a regulatory filing.
The company is focusing primarily on tuberculosis detection, with aims to develop a rapid, point-of-care test that could determine if a patient has the disease within 10 minutes. This past December, it piloted its TB test in South Africa – detecting tuberculosis among HIV positive and negative individuals. It’s got potential to monitor antibiotic therapy, Avisa said in a statement.
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This pilot study is meant to set the ground for global clinical trials, which are planned for 2017. Currently, the quickest diagnostic for tuberculosis takes about three hours – which brings value to the 10-minutes-or-less approach, Avisa says.
“With this, you could put everything in a backpack and you could just cycle to a village and test a whole lot of people,” said Graham Timmins, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico, said in a statement. “If somebody can be diagnosed and have their drug susceptibility determined in that single encounter, then you don’t lose them to follow-up. That’s a major improvement.”
Excluding this round, the diagnostics company has raised about $8 million to date.