AACC’s Disruptive Technology Award to Highlight Developers of AI and ML Technologies Advancing Medicine and Pathology

Three finalists will compete live at the Disruptive Technology Award session at the 2021 American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC; Washington, DC, USA) Annual Scientific Meeting and a winner will be selected and announced at the conclusion of the session.

AACC's Disruptive Technology Award Competition recognizes innovative testing and disruptive technology solutions that improve patient care through diagnostic performance or access to high quality testing. It provides an opportunity for early to mid-stage start-ups in the medical device, diagnostic, or digital health/health IT spaces to showcase their technology and present to a large audience and a panel of judges. The 2021 Disruptive Technology Award finalists and their disruptive technologies include Day Zero Diagnostics, Inc. — DZD OneSeq Dx; Mammoth Biosciences — DETECTR; and MeMed — MeMed COVID-19 Severity.

The first finalist, Day Zero Diagnostics has developed a set of breakthrough capabilities that can provide a complete diagnosis of bloodstream infections and sepsis, including both the species ID and antibiotic susceptibility profile, in hours vs. days. Its technology enables the unprecedented recovery of pathogen whole genome sequences directly from clinical samples that may contain up to a billion times more human DNA. The company’s algorithms then interpret the genomic data to provide accurate, comprehensive organism ID and antibiotic susceptibility profiles. Day Zero Diagnostics enables a targeted treatment on day zero of hospital admission, resulting in better patient outcomes and cost savings.

The second finalist, Mammoth Biosciences has catalyzed a new approach to molecular diagnostics, called DETECTR. Based on CRISPR, this programmable platform acts as a search engine for biology and is capable of finding and identifying any nucleic acid sequence in the genome. Using proprietary technology licensed exclusively from the University of California, Berkeley and developed internally, Mammoth is working on multiple form factors and test targets from infectious diseases to cancer. For example, DETECTR was configured in less than two weeks to detect SARS-CoV-2, demonstrating the platform’s ability to be quickly tailored to identify any DNA or RNA target. The resulting product, DETECTR BOOST, is a reagent kit that when combined with standard laboratory automation provides labs with unparalleled high throughput molecular testing.

The third finalist, MeMed BV’s lead product accurately differentiates bacterial from viral (BV) infection, enabling improved patient management, including appropriate antibiotic use, in order to help address the global healthcare challenge of antimicrobial resistance. Based on computational integration of bacterial and viral-responsive immune proteins, Key delivers the BV result in 15 minutes from serum. This test was clinically validated on thousands of patients, is CE-marked and 510(k) pending.

The three finalists will present data on their technology in a special session during the Annual Scientific Meeting. During this session, a panel of expert judges will evaluate all presented testing solutions based on feasibility and performance. The audience will also vote for their favorite technology.

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American Association for Clinical Chemistry