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AmplifiDx is developing a molecular point-of-care (POC) platform for rapid detection of infectious diseases, including STIs and respiratory diseases such as COVID-19. AmplifiDx’s system looks to delivers highly sensitive results - that are comparable to commercial labs’ - that are also low-cost and rapid, with the company’s goal of having those results in around 30 minutes.

CEO: Nancy Shoenbrunner

Headquarters: Boston, MA

Year Founded: 2020

Year Avestria First Invested: 2021 ((Fund I)

Looking for a job opportunity at AmplifiDx? Click here.

Recent Press:

January 21, 2024: Now in its 19th year, the Annual Non-Dilutive Funding Summit is a free educational event tailored towards executives in the life sciences looking to raise non-dilutive capital. In this short presentation, Nancy Shoenbrunner goes into detail about how non-dilutive funding helped to start AmplifiDx and has been the key source of capital for the company even since then: AmplifiDx has been awarded about $5 million to date, most of which has been through organizations and institutions like the NIH and various branches of it, including RADx and the National Cancer Institute.

May 23, 2023: AmplifiDx has received a $1.4M grant from NIH RADx: the National Institutes of Health Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics program. The company will use the money to supports it development of the AmplifiDx DX-1000 instrument as well as the RespiFast Assay: a nasal swab-based test to help detect COVID-19, influenza A and B, and RSV. Amplifi’s platform can deliver results for a COVID-19 test within 30 minutes and with high sensitivity comparable to that of a laboratory PCR results. This grant will mark the second collaboration between AmplifiDx and NIH RADx: Amplifi developed the foundational technology used during its COVID-19 test under a previous contract with RADx Tech.

May 25, 2021: This report analyzes the strain that clinical laboratories have been under due to COVID-19. The authors argue that labs have been designed and organized to support testing for local health systems rather than to support expanded testing for a global pandemic; as a result, labs that now need to process thousands of COVID-19 laboratory tests are facing oversaturation, disruption, and delays. Among other solutions to combat this mismatch between the labs’ current setup and their new priorities, the authors recommend optimizing lab tests for high demand, pursuing point-of-care testing and devices (like Amplifi’s), and reshuffling laboratory resources.

May 18, 2021: AmplifiDx is a Pitch Challenge finalist in the Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference. The RESI conference, which takes place in June, aims to connect early-stage companies and investors while the Pitch Challenge gives select companies the chance to pitch directly, answer questions, and compete for the prizes awarded to the top three companies.

September 8, 2020: This article in The Wall Street Journal examines the tradeoffs that public health officials are making around COVID-19 testing: they’re willing to seek out relatively accurate, rapid tests, (like at-home tests) over tests that may be more accurate but take longer to produce results (like laboratory-based tests). Thus tradeoff is the one that AmplifiDx is working to avoid by providing a testing solution that has the same sensitivity of labs’ tests and that can also return results within ~30 minutes instead of within days.

July 22, 2020: Both Quest and LabCorp are processing 5.5 million tests per week but need more than a week to return the results: a delay that means that individuals aren’t getting their results until after the point when they’re most infectious. The number of tests that need to be processed is expected only to increase during flu season when millions of Americans will order tests to ensure that their symptoms are only due to a seasonal flu and not to the coronavirus.

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