Molecular diagnostics company Co-Diagnostics is to receive over $2 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation toward completion of tuberculosis (TB) and human papillomavirus (HPV) tests for the company's Co-Dx PCR Home platform.
The grants of $1.33 million for TB and $987,000 for HPV were announced on July 18.
Co-Diagnostics, based in Salt Lake City, is designing specific tests for its Co-Dx PCR Home platform which are subject to review by regulatory bodies and are not yet available for sale.
They are intended for priority global markets, the company said.
Dwight Egan, CEO of Co-Diagnostics, said the grants would help support the worldwide effort to prevent the spread of both TB and HPV in countries where they have been endemic killers for generations.
“We believe that our new platform has the potential to dramatically improve access to diagnostics and thus reduce healthcare costs by making high quality diagnostics more accessible to the people and places where they are most needed,” Egan said in a statement.
The move follows last week’s award of $1.2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) Tech program to complete work on a respiratory panel on the Co-Dx PCR Home testing platform.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined Co-Diagnostics $250,000 over allegations that the firm filed misleading press releases about its COVID-19 tests and failed to disclose financial transactions involving executives' family members.
