Day Zero Diagnostics announces completion of $16M financing round

Day Zero Diagnostics Inc. (DZD), an infectious disease diagnostics company harnessing the power of whole-genome sequencing and AI to combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, announced today the recent completion of a $16M round of financing. This latest financing brings the total raised by Day Zero Diagnostics to $49M in venture capital funding and over $18M in non-dilutive funding.

“This funding is a strong vote of confidence in Day Zero Diagnostics’ potential to use rapid sequencing and AI to disrupt microbiology lab diagnostics,” said Jong Lee, CEO and co-founder of Day Zero Diagnostics. “DZD is focused on bringing an FDA-cleared diagnostic to market that will deliver the ‘holy grail’ of infectious disease diagnostics – same day organism identification and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling directly from clinical samples, and our investors share our belief in the game changing nature of our technology.”

DZD is developing a sequencing-based diagnostic that can identify a comprehensive range of bacterial and fungal pathogens and determine their antimicrobial susceptibility in less than 8 hours. Current approaches to antimicrobial resistance testing take days, a time delay associated with an 8% increase in death per hour.1 According to the CDC, antimicrobial resistance is associated with nearly 5 million deaths annually worldwide.

“No other company has solved the scientific and technical challenges required to make rapid ID and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling possible in such a short time,” said Dr. Douglas Kwon, an infectious disease physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a cofounder of the company. “Physicians understand that the real enemy in treating serious systemic infections is time, and we need reliable, comprehensive diagnostic information to inform clinical decision making far sooner than is possible today.”

DZD will use the recent funding to complete development of an improved Blood2Bac™ sample prep protocol, which can capture fungi as well as bacteria, using smaller sample volumes, and at substantially lower cost. The funding will also accelerate development of a prototype for the commercial system, including both the hardware system and the Keynome® family of cloud-based AI algorithms that provides high accuracy organism ID and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling. Using the diagnostic, hospitals will be able to reduce patient length of stay; the overuse of toxic, expensive, and ineffective antibiotics; and most importantly, save lives.
MB Bureau