New test will assist in rapid diagnosis of critical diseases

A new Dublin-based tech company has announced an equity injection worth €2.1 million to help it to set up and start to deliver its product.

HiberGene is developing a rapid test for meningitis and other diseases that can deliver a 100 per cent accurate result in under 10 minutes.

Kernel Capital leads the investment group with €1.4 million coming from private equity. Another €200,000 is coming from Enterprise Ireland and €500,000 from the Bank of Ireland MedTech Accelerator Fund managed by Kernel Capital, says Brendan Farrell, chief executive of HiberGene Diagnostics.

The company is moving immediately to get up and running, hiring three technical staff including a chief technical officer and R&D manager along with two marketing and business development staff.

“We are sufficiently set up so now the focus is on getting these products out to the hospitals ,” he says.

The company’s story is a textbook example of the time, effort and angst that goes into getting a tech start-up on the road. “We set up the company in 2009 and it had somewhat of a slow start,” Farrell says.

He had left his role as chief executive of Bray-based Trinity Biotech the year before and so was available for fresh opportunities. With undergrad and graduate degrees in biochemistry from University College Cork and his experiences at Trinity, it seemed likely that something related to molecular biochemistry was going to be on the cards.

Knowing his background Farrell’s now business partner Peter Kidney asked him to assess a new diagnostic tool developed at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. Kidney wanted to know whether it looked like a promising technology for commercialisation. It was an exceptionally fast test for meningococcal meningitis.

“I was impressed with the accuracy and speed of the test. Peter asked if we could develop it but I said we would need a menu of tests, not just the one.”

Enabling technology

They formed a company and sought a licence from Belfast Trust for the hospital, but it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“The test uses an enabling technology called loop mediated isothermal amplification (Lamp),” Farrell says. “The researchers in Belfast who developed the test used this Lamp technology. It is a way of getting at the actual genetic material of the organism you are trying to detect.”

That meant acquiring a licence to use Lamp, but the originators from the Eiken Chemical Company were based in Japan.

It was a slow process to agree licensing for these two technologies; a third was added when the hospital’s researchers came up with a second rapid test, this time for group B streptococcus, says Farrell. The follow-up then was to seek patent control in the US and the EU.

With the technology end sorted, they now had to look for funding. “We went out looking for money in earnest in 2012 but weren’t successful,” he says. “We wanted to raise €8 million but that was a little bit too much for a non-income-earning company.”

They scaled down their ambitions somewhat, thinking they could get by with €1.5 million, but then Kernel came forward and assembled an investment consortium which actually brought with it support worth €2.1 million.

First thing on the agenda is stabilising the product and giving it a decent shelf-life, says Farrell. For now the company will subcontract manufacture, but it still has to be packaged for use in hospital laboratories.

“Our target is large emergency hospitals because meningitis is time-critical and a fast diagnosis is essential,” he says. “It is very important to get it right and quickly and we get a result in under 10 minutes.”

Life-saving antibiotics

The current best tests use an older technology that can deliver results in 90 minutes, but that is a long time when you are waiting to start administering life-saving antibiotics.

The streptococcus test is useful in meningitis but also during pregnancy, given a woman asymptomatically infected with it could pass it on to a newborn, with infection of this kind causing death in 6 per cent of cases, he says. This high risk means it is a requirement that expectant mothers be tested in France and the UK. Ireland has no such requirement.

Reaching this point does not mean things will slow down for HiberGene Diagnostics.

“We are now embarking on a second round of fundraising, looking for about €2.5 million so we can put people into R&D and further develop the Lamp technology,” Farrell says.

“We are looking to use it for a range of organisms including MRSA [hospital superbug].”