Angstrom Bio Launches AMPD™, Platform for High-accuracy, High-frequency, Low-cost COVID-19 and Respiratory Pathogen Testing

Angstrom Bio, Inc. today announces the launch of AMPD™, its nanopore sequencing and machine learning powered platform for high-accuracy, high-frequency, low-cost COVID-19 and respiratory pathogen testing. AMPD leverages the extreme resolution and bandwidth of nanopore sequencing to provide the accuracy and volume necessary to detect the earliest stages of exposure to pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 and influenza and to enable schools and places of work to reopen safely and confidently. Angstrom will partner with businesses, schools, and public sector organizations to implement cost-effective testing programs designed to maximize employee and stakeholder safety and to minimize the potential for operational disruption. The company intends to bring more than 1,000,000 results per day online in 2021, at prices that enable nearly any organization to have access to repeated, high-quality testing. "Despite the tremendous progress made in diagnostics since the beginning of the pandemic, it is clear that testing today remains an area plagued by too many tradeoffs between availability, accuracy, and speed, as well as ease of collection, cost, and adaptability," said Carlos F. Santos, Ph.D., Angstrom's CEO. "We designed AMPD to eliminate the need for such tradeoffs. By leveraging the extraordinary resolution and bandwidth of nanopore sequencing and the power of our machine learning-driven diagnostic pipelines, and by rethinking pre-COVID-19 diagnostic workflows, we have been able to design a platform that can provide the extreme scale and accuracy required to meet the unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19." At the heart of AMPD is a novel nucleotide chemistry and computational biology platform designed to harness the bandwidth and resolution of Oxford Nanopore Technologies' nanopore Third-Generation Sequencing (TGS) systems. Unlike diagnostic systems that rely upon fluorescence-driven workflows for diagnostic analysis, nanopore TGS counts individual DNA molecules that pass through each of hundreds of nano-scale pores in a specially-designed membrane. The combination of single-molecule resolution and parallelism allow for the processing of tens of thousands of diagnostic results per AMPD run, while enabling orders of magnitude greater sensitivity than is currently available. This makes AMPD ideal for parties that require timely access to affordable, repeated testing, but that cannot compromise safety.