The European Commission recently selected MeMed Ltd, Tirat Carmel, Israel, as a finalist in Horizon 2020’s “Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME) Instrument” competition, which targets SMEs with innovative products that have the potential to better the EU economy and global healthcare. Receiving the top spot out of 90 competitive applicants, MeMed submitted a proposal relating to its Respiratory-ImmunoDx project. The European Commission has granted the company a 3-year award totaling €3 million.
Eran Eden, MeMed.
“We are excited by this unique vote of confidence from the European Commission,” says Eran Eden, PhD, chief executive of MeMed. “This funding will accelerate our development efforts and enable us to help a wider range of patients sooner.”
The award will be used primarily to support development of MeMed’s second-generation product ImmunoXpert, for rapid measurement of a patient’s immune response to infection at the point of care. The award will also fund a multicenter prospective clinical study of the technology for diagnosing patients with lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs). The study will enroll more than 1,000 patients and will be conducted in collaboration with research centers at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, London; Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany; and Rambam Health Care Campus, Haifa, Israel.
LRTIs are a leading cause of sickness and mortality in both children and adults worldwide. In Europe, 30 million people contract an LRTI annually, resulting in more than 1 million hospitalizations and 230,000 deaths.
The award from the European Commission builds on momentum created by MeMed’s disruptive technology platform, which leverages the fact that bacteria and viruses trigger different pathway responses in the immune system. By conducting extensive screening of immune system proteins from thousands of patients with acute infections, MeMed’s researchers have identified and validated unique protein signatures that distinguish bacterial infections from viral infections.
Kfir Oved, MeMed.
“We have discovered that a few proteins show distinctly different expression patterns in bacterial and viral infected patients,” says Kfir Oved, PhD, chief technology officer at MeMed. “Our team developed an assay and computational algorithm that integrates protein measurements to help diagnose the cause of the infection with high accuracy.”
For more information, visit MeMed.
