Day Zero Diagnostics, a three-year-old high-tech diagnostic company based at the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, said it completed an $8.6 million Series A round on Wednesday. The round was led by Triventures, a healthcare-focused venture capital fund with offices in Israel and California.
The Harvard-born startup, known as DZD, is developing a sequencing-based and machine learning-powered diagnostic system that identifies, within hours, both the species and the antibiotic resistance profile of a bacterial pathogen. Using the diagnostic, hospitals should be able to reduce hospital length of stay and the overuse of antibiotics, ultimately treating patients more effectively and quickly.
CDC defined antibiotic resistance as "one of the biggest public health challenges of our time." Each year in the U.S., at least 2 million people get an antibiotic-resistant infection, and at least 23,000 people die. Current approaches take days to provide antibiotic resistance profile info, the company said, a time delay that is associated with an 8 percent increase in death per hour for severe infections.
With the Series A funding, DZD said it will accelerate prototype development of its sample preparation technology and computational approach. In addition, funds will enable the introduction of a suite of sequencing-based diagnostic services to help clinicians address critical infection situations and transmission events.
"We are excited to partner with investors who share our vision about the potential of genome sequencing and machine learning for changing the field of infectious diseases," said Jong Lee, CEO and a co-founder of Day Zero Diagnostics, in a press release. "This funding allows us to continue our diagnostic system development effort and to expand our R&D program to additional use cases in infectious disease where speed and precision matter."
Existing investors, including Sands Capital Ventures and Golden Seeds, participated in the round. As part of the financing, Peter Fitzgerald, managing partner at Triventures, will join the company's board of directors.
The team of 12 DZD employees work out of a private wet lab facility within Harvard's Life Lab in Allston.
