Day Zero Diagnostics (DZD) said today it has received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID) intended to fund the development of an algorithm to automate the determination of infection relatedness in suspected hospital-acquired infection (HAI) outbreaks.
The grant, which DZD said totaled $224,000, will enable the company to continue development and initial validation of the algorithm, named ksim, using data from published hospital outbreaks, a large hospital dataset, and data from the company’s epiXact rapid whole genome sequencing and analysis service.
“For this Phase I SBIR grant, we are focused on development of the ksim algorithm using previously published HAI outbreak datasets, 5,000 clinical samples from a large single-hospital longitudinal WGS database, and data from our commercially available epiXact service over the next six months,” Jong Lee, MBA, DZD’s CEO and co-founder, told Clinical OMICs.