$250K Verizon Prize is a “Game-Changer” for Aldatu

Boston, MA, 3rd February 2015

A $250,000 prize to Aldatu Biosciences announced today from the Verizon Powerful Answers Awards stands to fundamentally change the way HIV treatment is delivered across the world by advancing the development of Aldatu’s affordable HIV drug resistance diagnostic, PANDAA™ HIV6.

Iain MacLeod, Aldatu co-founder and CSO, said “This is a game-changer. Resistance to HIV medications is such a huge global problem – and it’s only getting worse. This award will help Aldatu make real progress in addressing it.”

Aldatu’s powerful answer is the application of its proprietary PANDAA™ technology to a powerful personalized medicine tool that matches HIV-infected patients with effective drug regimens, and is specifically designed to overcome the clinical and economic challenges faced by resource-limited countries. PANDAA™ HIV6 is a simple, sample-in answer-out solution to HIV drug resistance testing that stands to radically improve the efficacy of HIV treatment programs in parts of the world with limited healthcare funds.

“This amount of funding will have a tangible impact on Aldatu’s ability to turn PANDAA™ HIV6 into a reality” said David Raiser, co-founder and CEO of Aldatu. “We are incredibly grateful to Verizon for sponsoring this program, which stands to facilitate real change in healthcare around the world.”

Raiser added, “The real winners here are the HIV-infected patients who may now get access to the care they’ve always deserved.

More information:
Verizon’s $1M Powerful Answers Award Winners Boast Solutions with Potential to Change our World for the Better // Verizon Powerful Answers Award 2014  // Introducing the Verizon Powerful Answers Award Winners for 2014

(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.