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| Sedia's HIV-1 Limiting Antigen-Avidity EIA test--Courtesy of Sedia |
Sedia Biosciences will use a new $1 million NIH grant to bring forward an HIV diagnostic test it hopes will better assess recently infected individuals and how advanced the virus has become inside the body.
The Portland, OR, company is getting the money from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It's considered Phase II funding that goes with a previous Small Business Innovation Research grant from the same agency and will support development and commercialization of Sedia's HIV-1 Limiting Antigen-Avidity EIA test, known technically as a "single-well enzyme assay."
The test measures HIV-1 antibody binding ability, something that will help determine how recently a person was infected and how advanced the HIV has become. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ministries of Public Health and other public health groups globally are using the assay right now, the new funding will help develop an FDA-regulated version, Sedia said. Spotting HIV infection early enables infected patients to get quicker treatment and care, as well as helps reduce infection risks, and public health groups globally have widely supported the assay's development, Sedia President and Chief Science Officer Ronald Mink said in a statement.
"The ongoing support for this assay from CDC, NIH and a broad range of public health groups around the world we believe demonstrates the value of making this assay available to clinicians treating infected individuals, enabling them to better understand the disease state in such individuals," Mink said.
Sedia cites statistics that suggest between 40% and 50% of new HIV infections come from infected persons who were recently infected themselves and have much higher viral loads as a result. The hope is that Sedia's test can reach these people and help reduce the rate of infection down the line as a result. Still, Sedia is far from the only company developing new HIV diagnostic tests targeted toward identifying infections early.
Last August, for example, Alere ($ALR) won the FDA's nod for its Determine HIV-1/2 Ag/Ab Combo test, which spots an HIV-1 antigen and antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2. There's also Zyomyx, which won $12 million in fresh financing last June, and signed on Mylan ($MYL) as its global distribution partner for its CD4 T-cell count test for HIV patients. Zyomyx's option is disposable, low-cost and targeted to emerging markets, designed to screen for HIV quickly in a bid to quickly connect infected patients to antiretroviral drugs.
- read the release
Editor's note: A now-outdated reference to Daktari has been deleted from this story.