Benzinga | Jan 10, 2022 08:21AM EST

Aptorum Group Offers Update On Clinical Validation Of Its Infectious Disease Liquid Biopsy Technology

Aptorum Group Limited (NASDAQ:APM, PARIS:APM) ("Aptorum Group" or "Aptorum"), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on novel technologies including treatments and diagnosis of infectious diseases, announced that its subsidiary company, Aptorum Innovations Holding Limited ("Aptorum Innovations"), has commenced clinical validation of its molecular based rapid pathogen diagnostics liquid biopsy technology ("RPIDD") for the diagnosis of pathogens including viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites.

Aptorum Innovations is pleased to announce that under ongoing planned clinical validations in Singapore for RPIDD, 12 patients have been enrolled with febrile neutropenia and sepsis conditions and that over 53 samples have been collected and analyzed. So far, various bacteria and viruses have been detected in these patient samples, including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Herpesviridae. The data have been cross-validated by standard of care diagnostics results such as blood culture technology. RPIDD achieved analytical sensitivity and specificity of spiked samples of at most 100% and 90% respectively at both low depth (60,000 reads) and high depth (1 million reads) sequencing. RPIDD will continue to undergo validations during 2022, in parallel with its pre-commercialization process in 2022.

Mr Ian Huen, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Aptorum Group, commented: "We are very pleased to announce this exciting update on our RPIDD technology. The high sensitivity and specificity demonstrated so far further support our objective to deliver a rapid, accurate and cost-effective liquid biopsy-based technology for infectious disease diagnostics. We hope that RPIDD will revolutionize traditional first line clinical diagnostics approaches that are time consuming or that fail to detect or identify disease causing pathogens. We believe that a rapid molecular based diagnostics approach for infectious diseases will significantly reduce mortality and morbidity. In 2022, we are commencing pre-commercialization processes of our RPIDD technology, including but not limited to identifying clinical partners to support its roll out."