The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a test developed by Israeli medtech firm MeMed that can rapidly determine whether an infection has been caused by a bacteria or a virus.
The MeMed BV test, which was developed by MeMed using a $30m grant from the EU and US Department of Defense, does not directly detect the cause of an infection.
Instead, it analyses three host response proteins – TRAIL, IP-10, and CRP – that show up in a patient’s blood at very different levels depending on whether the immune system is fighting off a virus or bacteria.
