The Government of Canada has awarded Xagenic, Inc., a privately held Toronto-based company, an investment contract to support further development of a lab-free, point-of-care (POC) molecular diagnostic platform with a 20-minute time to result.
Xagenic will receive up to $990,000 CAD in funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario). The effort is part of the “Investing in Business Innovation” initiative, designed to boost private sector investment in Canadian start-up businesses to accelerate the development of new products, processes and practices and bring them to market.
The announcement was made in the keynote speech at the Conference Board of Canada’s Business Innovation Summit 2013 in Toronto this week.
“This investment from FedDev complements our $10M Series A venture capital round, which included investments from CTI Life Sciences Fund, the Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund (OETF) and QIAGEN N.V.”, said Shana Kelley, Chief Technology Officer of Xagenic. “In the current environment, financial support from the Government enhances our capabilities to develop cutting edge technologies that improve patient care,” added the company’s Director of Business Development, Ihor Boszko.
The company’s fully automated technology platform is based on ultrasensitive microelectrode arrays. Nanostructured sensors, coupled with highly amplified signals that are generated by an electrocatalytic reporter system, allow direct analysis of clinical samples. The technology is highly versatile and has been validated with a variety of targets, cell types, and specimen types. It provides rapid (15-20 minute) sample-to-answer diagnostic test results with nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT)-like performance.
Because the system does not rely on optical detection components or enzymatic amplification, crude samples can be analyzed with minimal sample processing. Xagenic is currently developing infectious disease diagnostic tests that will allow the detection of a variety of analytes on the platform in situations where rapid test turnaround will provide clinically actionable results that dramatically improve patient care.
Source: PRNewswire, Xagenic