Date: Mar 08, 2016 Source: bizjournals (
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Advanced Animal Diagnostics, a Morrisville company that develops tools to diagnose disease in livestock, has raised exactly half of a $3.4 million round to develop a new tool that could curb the use of antibiotics in livestock.
"We've got some very encouraging results from our first trial," says AAD president and CEO Joy Parr Drach, though did not disclose how much capital the company would need to bring the new device to market. "We are just focused on making sure that it delivers fast, accurate results," she says.
Consumers have a growing appetite for eating fewer antibiotics in their food and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is implementing a voluntary plan with industry to phase out the use of certain antibiotics for enhanced food production.
Some antibiotics are medically necessary, and this new AAD tool would help feeders diagnose their animals in order to determine if an antibiotic is medically necessary.
"We need to be selective about the drugs we use in animals and when we use them," says William Flynn, deputy director for science policy at FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM). "Antimicrobial resistance may not be completely preventable, but we need to do what we can to slow it down."
AAD employs 30 workers and is one of the North Carolina companies to benefit from the N.C. Biotechnology Center, which pumped $20,000 into the company in a 2006 loan. AAD has gone on to raise more than $36 million in venture capital and debt financing since then.
In mid-February, the company announced that company founder and Chief Scientific Officer Rudy Rodriguez was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The academy cited his "inventions to analyze blood and separate blood components that enable widespread clinical therapies."
He joined a group of just 2,275 U.S. members and 232 foreign members at the NAE, according to AAD.
"Rudy has saved countless human lives by developing technology to analyze white blood cells. Now he's using that ingenuity to help livestock producers more precisely use antibiotics with on-farm diagnostics that meet consumer needs and improve producer profitability," Parr Drach said at the time.
