Day Zero Diagnostics — which seeks to harness whole-genome sequencing and AI in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections — announced today that it has successfully wrapped up a $16M financing round.
The latest round raises the Boston-based company’s venture capital funding total to $49M, coupled with over $18M in non-dilutive funding.
“This funding is a strong vote of confidence in Day Zero Diagnostics’ potential to use rapid sequencing and AI to disrupt microbiology lab diagnostics,” Day Zero Diagnostics co-founder and CEO Jong Lee said in a news release.
“DZD is focused on bringing an FDA-cleared diagnostic to market that will deliver the ‘holy grail’ of infectious disease diagnostics – same-day organism identification and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling directly from clinical samples, and our investors share our belief in the game-changing nature of our technology.”
Day Zero Diagnostics seeks to blaze a trail with a diagnostic tool that not only identifies a myriad of bacterial and fungal pathogens but also gauges their antimicrobial susceptibility — all within an eight-hour timeframe. In contrast, present-day antimicrobial resistance tests take significantly longer, according to the company. The news release cited a 2006 study in the journal Critical Care Medicine that found that the risk of death rises by 7.6% each hour that antimicrobial administration is delayed for a person with septic shock and hypotension.
Antimicrobial-resistant infections were associated with nearly 5 million deaths worldwide in 2019, according to the CDC.
“No other company has solved the scientific and technical challenges required to make rapid ID and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling possible in such a short time,” said Dr. Douglas Kwon, an infectious disease physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a co-founder of Day Zero Diagnostics.
“Physicians understand that the real enemy in treating serious systemic infections is time, and we need reliable, comprehensive diagnostic information to inform clinical decision-making far sooner than is possible today,” Kwon said in the news release.
DZD will use the recent funding to complete the development of an improved Blood2Bac sample prep protocol. The enhanced protocol will enable the capture of fungi as well as bacteria, using smaller sample volumes and at a substantially lower cost, according to the company.
Day Zero Diagnostics will also use the funds to accelerate the development of a prototype for its commercial system, including both the hardware system and the Keynome family of cloud-based AI algorithms to provide high-accuracy organism ID and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling.
According to the company, the resulting diagnostics will allow hospitals to reduce patient stay lengths, antibiotics overuse, and patient deaths.
