T2 Biosystems 4Q
March 4, 2021
Finally, we strengthened the balance sheet by raising $85.3 million through the sale of common stock, and we renegotiated the terms of our credit facility with CRG.
In 2021, we will continue to prioritize improvement in product gross margins.
Moving to our third priority, advancing our pipeline:
We made significant progress on our new product pipeline during 2020. In March, we made the decision to develop a test to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for COVID-19 infections. While this product was not on our radar screen when we started the year, our team developed and launched a high-quality molecular diagnostic test, the T2SARS-CoV-2 Panel, under FDA Emergency Use Authorization guidelines, in less than three months. We subsequently determined that the T2SARS-CoV-2TM Panel is capable of detecting SARS-CoV-2 virus variants including those identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, along with 99.99% of all currently identified variants based on sequence alignments and in silico analysis.
We continue to prioritize programs under the milestone-based product development contract awarded by the U.S. government, or BARDA, in 2019. As a reminder, total funding available under the BARDA contract is up to $69 million and we are focused on developing three new products: 1) a next generation instrument, 2) a comprehensive sepsis panel, 3) and biothreat panel.
Our next generation instrument is designed to be fully automated and random access, like our current T2Dx Instrument, yet will provide faster turnaround times at a lower cost per reportable result. The instrument is also being designed to detect an increased number of pathogens from a single, whole blood sample.
The comprehensive sepsis panel is designed to cover up to 99% of all blood-borne infections and detect more than 250 species, in addition to all blood-borne antibiotic resistant threats identified by CDC, in a single test. The test is designed to use a whole blood sample and have a turnaround time of less than three hours. We believe this comprehensive sepsis panel has the potential to totally disrupt the traditional blood culture workflow, and become the new standard of care.
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