MeMed Secures $9.2M U.S. Grant to Advance Pathogen Identification Platform and Combat Antibiotic Misuse

On April 27, Israeli diagnostics company MeMed announced that it had secured $9.2 million in funding from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The funds will be used to develop rapid pathogen identification devices.

MeMed is a high-tech company specializing in in vitro diagnostic instruments. Its core product, Immuno Xpert, is a rapid in vitro system for identifying infectious pathogens. With just a single drop of blood, it can quickly detect pathogens such as Mycoplasma, Chlamydia, viruses, and bacteria. The company aims to develop rapid and effective in vitro diagnostic products to help physicians prescribe targeted treatments, make rational choices regarding antibiotic use, and spare patients from the misuse of antibiotics.

Antibiotics are among the most widely used medications in current clinical practice, capable of inhibiting or even killing pathogens at certain concentrations. To some extent, it can be said that modern medicine would not exist without antibiotics. In the absence of antibiotics, postoperative infections from routine surgeries, let alone cancer treatments, could lead to patient mortality.

However, antibiotics remain a double-edged sword, as some bacteria inevitably survive during treatment. Prolonged and excessive use of antibiotics can lead to bacterial resistance, leaving infected patients without suitable antimicrobial therapies and resulting in untreatable conditions.

Since the discovery of penicillin by British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming in 1929, antibiotics have become widely used in clinical practice. The advent of antibiotics has helped humanity resolve numerous medical challenges; however, the misuse of antibiotics has also become a global issue. A 2016 report commissioned by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust projected that by 2050, the global economic losses attributable to antibiotic misuse could reach as high as $100 trillion.

Eran Eden, Co-founder and CEO of Memed, vividly likened the immune response to a war raging within the body: “Know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.” In other words, identifying the specific type of pathogen causing the infection is essential for selecting appropriate medications or treatment regimens, thereby avoiding the overuse of antibiotics.

Currently, there are numerous methods for pathogen detection, such as direct microscopy, latex agglutination, PCR identification, and sequencing. The most prevalent method is culture-based detection, which involves identifying pathogens by culturing them. However, this technique has significant drawbacks: the detection process is slow, and not all pathogens are easily accessible (for instance, in cases of otitis media behind the tympanic membrane). These factors limit the ability of this technique to provide clinicians with timely and effective information over the long term, highlighting its limitations in future clinical applications.

“Timely, rapid, and simple tests can detect one or two viruses (such as rhinovirus), but how significant is this really? Who gets infected with the same virus throughout their entire life? Moreover, simple tests cannot clarify the causal relationship between the disease and the pathogen, which may sometimes lead to misdiagnosis,” said Eden.

“Based on years of research in cancer immunotherapy, Eden and Kfir Oved, Co-founder and CTO of MeMed, aim to identify pathogens involved in immune responses through reverse-engineering approaches. ‘The final results show that favorable outcomes can be achieved as long as the right methods are employed,’ Eden revealed.”

By detecting soluble proteins, this technology enables biological characterization within minutes, eliminating the “prolonged wait” associated with culture-based methods. Furthermore, a significant advantage of this approach lies in the ubiquitous nature of the human immune system; even when pathogen cells from the infection site cannot be isolated, detection can still be achieved through soluble proteins.

Memed employs a diagnostic technology that combines three proteins associated with pathogens—TRAIL, IP-10, and C-reactive protein. This technology has been validated in large-scale studies. However, it is not without flaws. Its primary limitation is limited adaptability. Furthermore, although this technology offers improvements in detection speed and ease of use compared to culture methods, each test still takes one hour to complete and requires operation by skilled technicians. As such, it is not an ideal solution for emergency departments.

Therefore, the Memed team is developing a next-generation platform, aiming to deliver simpler and faster testing solutions. They hope that funding from DTRA will accelerate their development progress.

“Establishing Memed was driven by the hope of consolidating the testing process into a single compact instrument. A single drop of blood can effectively identify pathogens within minutes.” Eden stated, “Providing physicians with actionable information will significantly help curb antibiotic misuse.”

It is understood that the next-generation ImmunoXpert platform continues to utilize the previous triple-protein detection technology and the same algorithms. The difference, however, is that it is a plug-and-play platform, with the entire testing process completed within 15 minutes.