The company announced accomplishment of the following key milestones and recent developments in the first quarter as well as 2021 to date:
Following the previously announced resumption of the FDA’s review of the Acuitas AMR Gene Panel 510(k) submission, which had been delayed due to the FDA’s prioritization of COVID-19 related emergency use authorizations, OpGen has worked closely with the FDA’s review team to address any remaining edits and comments by the FDA to key documents such as the intended use statement, instructions for use, electronic user guide and others. The FDA recently informed OpGen that completion of its review would require additional time due to the current public health crisis. The FDA further informed OpGen that it intends to provide its written feedback to specific documents by the end of May 2021 and to complete its review by the end of August 2021. As of today, OpGen has already received feedback from the FDA on most of the aforementioned key documents under review. The FDA also clarified that these timelines can be affected by various factors including the FDA’s other workload and public health priorities. Although the FDA has not committed to a clearance decision timeline, OpGen will continue to proactively engage with the FDA in order to facilitate a final clearance decision.
OpGen announced signing an extension and expansion agreement for its strategic collaboration with the New York State Department of Health (“DOH”) by another six months through September 30, 2021 with the focus of expanding the reach of the platform, increasing the volume of testing, and enhancing data collection.
OpGen received Chinese NMPA approval for the IVD use of the Curetis Unyvero instrument system for the Chinese market with the application of the Unyvero cartridge for pneumonia currently under review and pending approval.
OpGen subsidiary Curetis prepared and submitted a pre-submission request to the FDA to discuss and align on regulatory pathway and clinical trial design for the Unyvero UTI application. Due to the COVID pandemic, FDA has provided written feedback only in lieu of a meeting.
OpGen subsidiary Curetis has continued to provide SARS-CoV-2 testing services, serving the community as a confirmatory PCR test lab for several local SARS-CoV-2 screening test centers.
OpGen subsidiary Curetis entered into exclusive distribution partnership in Colombia with Annar Health Technologies for Curetis’ Unyvero A50 platform.
OpGen announced the results from its highly attended webinar titled “Pneumonia Diagnosis: Bacterial Superinfection in COVID-19 Patients,” where two infectious disease professionals presented their independent study results from the Unyvero Hospitalized Pneumonia (HPN) and Unyvero Lower Respiratory (LRT BAL) panels, demonstrating the importance of distinguishing COVID-19 patients with bacterial superinfection early and accurately, and highlighted that Unyvero detected bacterial pathogens up to 7 days earlier and would have enabled prompt and appropriate targeted antibiotics in 41.3% of cases and reduced time to appropriate therapy by 25.7 hours.
OpGen announced publication of final study results of the Unyvero HPN Panel for Diagnosis of Bacterial Co-Infections in ICU Patients with COVID-19 pneumonia showcasing that high negative predictive value of 99.8% may allow for reduction in unnecessary antibiotic use and support antibiotic stewardship efforts.
Several scientific contributions illustrating the benefits of the Unyvero Lower Respiratory panels and the utility of the Acuitas AMR Gene Panel will be presented at the World Microbe Forum, June 20-24, 2021.
OpGen subsidiary Ares Genetics announced publication of a study introducing best practice techniques for AI-powered prediction of antibiotic susceptibility testing which aimed at advancing good machine learning practices (GMLP) for WGS-based AST by describing best practice techniques for training and evaluation of predictive models, as well as introducing an optimized model architecture to reduce bias and promote robustness.
OpGen subsidiary Ares Genetics signed several agreements with early access customers for the new Ares universal pathogen assay (ARESupa). The initial version of this target enrichment NGS panel is aimed at enabling testing for pathogens and AMR in native specimens and covers over 6,000 genetic markers for AMR selected from ARESdb.
OpGen subsidiary Ares Genetics will be presenting at the upcoming Amazon Web Services (AWS) Healthcare & life Sciences Virtual Symposium on May 27, 2021 on “Bridging limitations in NGS-based infectious disease testing using machine learning.”
OpGen completed a $25 million registered direct offering priced at the market with one healthcare-focused U.S. institutional investor, as well as a warrant exercise and exchange deal for proceeds of $ 9.7 million.
Mr. Schacht commented, “We had a busy quarter that resulted in great progress towards the fight against AMR with multiple publications issued supporting OpGen’s products and mission, new and existing partnership growth that will help drive topline revenue and OpGen also announced regulatory progress particularly with the Chinese NMPA. We also significantly strengthened our balance sheet during the first quarter. As we push through the second quarter, we believe we can achieve an FDA clearance decision for our Acuitas AMR Gene Panel as soon as the FDA’s timelines will permit and work towards pipeline and growth objectives in the year ahead and I look forward to the company’s continued successes.”