A Baltimore diagnostic firm closed a $2 million funding round on Thursday that it hopes will help launch a device to give patients with urinary tract infections a quick route to recovery.
Astek Diagnostics' funding round is led by Wexford Science and Technology's venture capital arm, the Wexford SciTech Venture Fund, with participation from Iyana Capital, the Maryland Momentum Fund and the Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO)Founder Mustafa Al-Adhami said the money will enable the startup's Jiddu device to go commercial and be part of five clinical studies to prove that it is effective in diagnosing urinary tract infections faster than a traditional blood test.
Al-Adhami said that Jiddu will help doctors immediately determine what antibiotic a UTI patient needs so they can avoid the agonizing limbo period between the diagnosis of the illness and receiving proper treatment.
Astek Diagnostics hopes to get full U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 16 months. The company is working with Baltimore product design firm Key Tech to get ready for mass production of the device. There is a demand for UTI-focused products since it is one of the most common infectious diseases in the U.S., impacting 15 million women a year, according to NPR. Doctors across the world diagnosed 400 million UTIs in 2019, according to a paper published in Front Public Health.
The company will begin the commercial rollout by targeting hospitals, primary care doctors and urologists. Astek will have a second rollout targeted to more general medical care, such as urgent care centers, or pharmacy minute clinics. Astek Diagnostics is currently located in the University of Maryland Baltimore, BioPark but Al-Adhami is planning to move to a lab space in the Baltimore Peninsula development.
The current standard for treating a UTI forces patients to wait several days after an initial diagnosis, Al-Adhami said. It usually takes that long for a doctor to get the results of a blood test back that shows what specific bacteria caused the infection. Doctors are forced to use a scattershot approach, giving patients several antibiotics in the hopes that one will work in the time between diagnosis and the test results. The approach often means patients are given the incorrect antibiotic that is not effective in treating their illness.
Al-Adhami cuts out one of the steps in the process of treating a UTI. His test determines what antibiotic is best for the patient, instead of identifying the bacteria, he said. The device is preloaded with several antibiotics and determines which one does the best job of killing the bacteria hurting the patient. The Jiddu can give doctors an antibiotic recommendation in as little as 50 minutes, he said.
Al-Adhami’s personal experience of seeing the suffering caused by a UTI that does not get proper treatment inspired the creation of Astek. A UTI-induced delirium caused Al-Adhami’s grandfather to break his hip after a fall. The doctor prescribed the elderly man two incorrect antibiotics, prolonging his suffering before they could figure out the right drug treatment.
Astek Diagnostics began as a project that Al-Adhami and co-founder Kevin Tran created in the former's basement. The duo made a prototype in one year, building lab equipment out of an engraving pen and using a kitchen oven to set molds. Astek Diagnostics began as a blood testing company, hoping to detect sepsis. Al-Adhami changed the product to focus on urine instead of blood to get quicker FDA approval, but plans to eventually use the technology to help sepsis patients. UTIs and sepsis are connected since an untreated UTI can infect the kidneys and cause the deadly immune response.
“For a sepsis patient, every hour without a proper antibiotic means there is a 7% less chance of survival,” Al-Adhami said. “By the time a culture comes back after two days, it's often too late.”
