Molecular diagnostics company Inflammatix announced it raised $57 million in Series E funding led by Khosla Ventures and Think.Health. This funding round will support regulatory filing and early commercialization of the company’s lead product, the TriVerity Acute Infection and Sepsis Test (TriVerity).
TriVerity is a blood test supposed to fill a critical need in the emergency department (ED) setting. Each year, 20 million people arrive at the hospital suspected of having an acute infection or sepsis. Recent company-sponsored clinical studies validate previous research suggesting that physician assessment and vital signs-based scoring underestimate severity in up to half of patients suspected of acute infection or sepsis.
With an annual incidence of 2.7 million cases and an annual mortality rate of 350,000, sepsis is a leading cause of death in U.S. hospitals. It costs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) $53 billion yearly, making it the most costly diagnosis among Medicare beneficiaries.
Along with leading investors Khosla Ventures and Think.Health, the Inflammatix Series E funding round included participation from Northpond Ventures, D1 Capital Partners, Iberis Capital, Vesalius BioCapital, OSF Healthcare, RAW Ventures, and others. This funding round brings Inflammatix’s total private capital raised to more than $200 million and more than $50 million in grants and contracts from various government agencies and foundations.
TriVerity, a blood test performed on Inflammatix’s novel Myrna Instrument, has been uniquely designed to determine whether an infection is present and how likely a patient will need ICU-level interventions. Getting to an accurate diagnosis faster would not only save lives but also dramatically improve hospital efficiency and health system resource allocation. Earlier and more accurate diagnoses may also help hospitals comply with the CMS SEP-1 Bundle, a value-based payments quality measure intended to ensure rapid sepsis detection and treatment.
After receiving Breakthrough Device Designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November 2023 and completing the SEPSIS-SHIELD study NCT04094818, Inflammatix recently submitted a regulatory packet to the FDA for the TriVerity Test. The company hopes to receive FDA clearance later this year.
KEY QUOTES:
“The newly raised funds will help us to expand our commercial team and plan clinical interventional and health economic studies as we await FDA clearance over the coming months. TriVerity is bringing the promise of machine learning and AI to infection and sepsis care. We hope to help hospitals improve their performance in terms of complying with sepsis detection and treatment protocols and optimizing patient throughput. We greatly appreciate the strong investor confidence in TriVerity and are excited to be very close to offering this novel test to physicians.”
-Dr. Timothy Sweeney, CEO and co-founder of Inflammatix
“Despite incremental improvements in patient outcomes, the death toll from sepsis remains disproportionately high among vulnerable populations. The challenge is that existing diagnostics are not able to detect sepsis early enough to trigger timely intervention, and by the time noticeable clinical symptoms appear, it’s often too late. TriVerity takes a novel approach by detecting the RNA changes that occur in immune cells prior to the manifestation of disease, enabling clinicians to respond faster and sometimes before physiological symptoms are even present. This is a step-change in life-saving care that physicians have been wanting for decades.”
-Alex Morgan, partner at Khosla Ventures
