Huntsville-based GeneCapture is looking to make headway after receiving two investments from private and government sources.
In August, the company won contracts from two Department of Defense agencies totaling $2.1 million to prepare its portable rapid pathogen detection technology for independent and in-field testing. This brings GeneCapture’s total awards from the DOD to $5.5 million.
The company was selected for a $1.1 million small business innovation research (SBIR) Phase II contract with the Defense Health Agency. GeneCapture’s approach to identifying mixed infections and their antibiotic susceptibility will be utilized in the work. The application is for point of care wound management in harsh environments. The scope of the effort includes designing a new disposable cartridge to report the antibiotic susceptibility directly from the sample in 30 to 90 minutes.
In addition, GeneCapture was also awarded a $1 million follow-on contract for a chemical and biological defense SBIR contract to further mature GeneCapture’s portable infection detection CAPTURE platform and allow for independent testing.
The contract was awarded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency on behalf of the Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense. The work is supporting the JSTO-CBD Medical Diagnostics Division and addresses requirements of the Joint Chemical and Biological Defense Program.
The two-year contract requires the delivery of test prototypes to independent labs including overseas locations where endemic pathogens are found.
“Our rapid diagnostics system is designed to be transportable for far-forward operations without the need for reagent refrigeration or grid power,” said Peggy Sammon, CEO of GeneCapture. “This will greatly reduce the logistics requirements for remote operations, making testing more accessible.”
GeneCapture has also secured private funding. Sammon said that the company has landed $1.2 million as part of the first part of more funding to come. While the source has not been revealed, Sammon said the funds came from a group that is interested in alleviating global human suffering due to infections.
This series of funding for the Huntsville-based outfit comes as the company is growing, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We're very fortunate to have government funding, during the Covid time, because there hasn't been any hiccups to that funding at all," Sammon said. "And that has helped us with stability. In the commercial market, the good thing about Covid is that frontline workers are now accepting molecular tests as meaningful, and that's a good market trend that we're seeing. The difficult thing about Covid ... is that so many of the investors and strategic partners were only interested in Covid and not broad-based platforms. And so that had a kind of a narrowing impact, which we fully understand, that's typical during a global crisis like this, but now we're starting to see that the mental space for looking at more than just one pathogen is really starting to open up.”
GeneCapture currently has 12 employees, which is a 25% bump from the previous year. It is located inside the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and has been able to keep the lab running during the periods of Covid restrictions due to the modernity of the lab space.
