Using Sequencing and AI for Infectious Disease Detection

Day Zero Diagnostics (DZD) is seeking to develop a more effective way of detecting infectious disease using artificial intelligence and genome sequencing. The Boston-based company announced it has raised $8.6 million in its mission to further develop the test.
 
DZD’s series A round was led by Triventures with significant participation from existing investors including Sands Capital Ventures and Golden Seeds.
 
With the financing, the company will accelerate prototype development of its sample preparation technology and computational approach. In addition, funds will enable the introduction of the company’s DZD Lab Services, a suite of sequencing based diagnostic services to help clinicians address critical infection situations and transmission events.
 
The company said its technology, which is in development, is a sequencing-based rapid diagnostic that identifies, within hours, both the species and the antibiotic resistance profile of a bacterial pathogen. Current approaches take days to provide similar information, a time delay that is associated with an 8% increase in death per hour for severe infections. DZD said it uses high throughput sequencing technologies and proprietary machine learning algorithms to rapidly predict pathogen species and drug resistance profiles.
 
“We’re developing a technology using much more modern methods of enabling diagnostics for antibiotic resistance,” Jong Lee, CEO and Co-founder of DZD, told MD+DI. “We’re trying to work direct from a clinical sample of getting that DNA and using our computational approach of analyzing that DNA and to predict what its antibiotic resistance is.”
 
There have been some significant movements in the race to develop better diagnostics in for antibiotic resistance.  Earlier this month, Novodiag CarbaR+, a test for detecting carbapenemase-producing enterobacteriaceae (CPE) in just 80 minutes, won CE mark. The test was approved by Mobidiag.