Aldatu Begins Offering COVID19 Testing Services for Health Care Providers, Employers and Schools

WATERTOWN, Mass., February 24, 2021 (PR Web) – Aldatu Biosciences, the leader in adaptive PCR diagnostics, announced the opening of new, expanded lab and R&D space in Watertown. The move to the new, 7,000-square-foot facility comes as demand grows for Aldatu’s unique PCR-based test for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID19.

Along with the move, Aldatu is launching a new service, Aldatu Diagnostics (www.aldatudx.com), to provide rapid-turnaround processing of diagnostic tests for hospitals, employers, and other large organizations coping with new demands during the pandemic. Aldatu Diagnostics was certified last week as a CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) lab by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Aldatu also sells its diagnostics in kit form to health care providers, NGOs, governments, and other groups around the world.

“COVID19 presents unique diagnostic testing challenges,” said Iain MacLeod, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Aldatu. “As the disease spreads, more localities need to engage in widespread testing to identify and contain outbreaks. At the same time, the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate. This makes it crucial to employ a test that can accurately detect the virus and keep false positives and false negatives to a minimum. Our PANDAA™ platform has demonstrated it can work with the new SARS-CoV-2 variants with no loss of sensitivity and specificity.”

For health care providers, employers and others with the need for rapid-turnaround SARS-CoV-2 testing, Aldatu Diagnostics offers the following:

  • Sample pickup by local courier throughout New England
  • Results within 24 hours
  • Competitive pricing with volume discounts
  • Unique access to the PANDAA™ platform, which adapts to emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 with no reduction in performance.
  • A team with extensive experience in high complexity testing

Aldatu has doubled its staff to accommodate the new processing service as it continues to develop novel diagnostics for global health challenges and emerging diseases.

The company, launched out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, had previously been located in Lab Central, the famed Cambridge biotech incubator.

“As a Public Benefit Corporation, Aldatu’s mission is to serve the growing testing needs created by the COVID19 pandemic,” said MacLeod. “We’re excited to expand the scope of our services as governments work to halt the spread of COVID19 and restore public health. In particular, we look forward to helping urgent care centers, clinics and schools which do not have in-house diagnostic capabilities.”


More information:

Aldatu Biosciences

Aldatu Biosciences, Inc. is a Boston area-based early-stage biotechnology company and a leader in adaptive PCR-based diagnostics for global health and emerging diseases, including COVID-19, developing innovative diagnostic tools based on its proprietary qPCR-enabling platform, PANDAA™. Aldatu is committed to commercializing products that address diagnostic challenges in around the world and which improve both the quality of patient care and healthcare cost-efficiency.

Aldatu is a a former resident of the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab and LabCentral, and a graduate of the MassBio MassCONNECT program. Inquiries can be sent to change@aldatubio.com.

Aldatu Diagnostics

Aldatu Diagnostics, LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aldatu Biosciences, Inc. and is a CLIA-certified laboratory. Additional information on the lab registration can be found on the CDC website at https://www.cdc.gov/clia/LabSearch.html (CLIA lab number 22D2209238).

(BOSTON, MA) —Aldatu Biosciences, a biotechnology company developing gold standard molecular diagnostic assays and based real-time PCR, today announced it has been awarded a $3 Million Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will fund the continued advancement of the company’s proprietary PANDAA™ technology platform and its specific application to the first universal, pan-filovirus detection and differentiation of Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus, the causative agents of Ebola Virus Disease and Marburg Virus Disease.

There is an urgent global unmet market need for a standardized, commercially available pan-species filovirus test that is accessible to resource-limited settings, especially considering the growing reach of the filovirus family as evidenced by the first-ever outbreak in Tanzania that was reported on March 21, 2023.  With a case fatality rate of 88%, Marburg is one of the deadliest of the hemorrhagic fevers. The WHO reported that the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa generated more than 28,000 cases and more than 11,000 deaths in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone and the CDC reported that more than $3.6 billion was spent to fight the epidemic.

Challenges associated with filovirus biology have previously limited the performance of qPCR in filovirus diagnostics. Many filovirus tests are lab-developed tests and are not available for broad commercial use.  Also, current RT-PCR LDTs are only able to detect regionally endemic clades.