NEW YORK — Autonomous Medical Devices (AMDI) said on Wednesday that it has been awarded $1.2 million from the US National Institutes of Health to develop a rapid point-of-care system for COVID-19 testing.
The grant was awarded under the NIH's Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics, or RADx, program, which was launched in early 2020 to accelerate the development and commercialization of testing technologies for COVID-19.
According to AMDI, the RT-PCR system is being designed to provide a 10-minute sample-to-result for up to 32 individual target sequences without the need for sample preparation. Specific details about the system are slated for poster presentation at the upcoming American Association for Clinical Chemistry and American Society for Microbiology meetings this summer, a company spokesperson said.
"We feel this proprietary new product will allow public health officials to respond quickly to new variants and provide patients and their providers access to fast, high-quality molecular results," AMDI CEO David Okrongly said in a statement.
AMDI noted that products being developed with RADx funding are expected to be ready for commercialization within 36 months. In September, the Santa Ana, California-based company said that it had received its quality management system to ISO 13485:2016 by Intertek, setting it up for commercialization of its first diagnostics system this year.