OpGen Subsidiary Ares Genetics Announces The Strategic Expansion Of ARESdb Proprietary Contents

Following successful completion of Phase 1, Ares Genetics has now entered into Phase 2 of its collaboration with a leading U.S. CRO and reference lab, gaining access to 1,000 proprietary clinical isolates from key pathogens

ARESdb contents has grown by more than 40% in a year

OpGen, Inc. a precision medicine company harnessing the power of molecular diagnostics and informatics to help combat infectious disease, announced that its subsidiary, Ares Genetics (Ares), has successfully completed Phase 1 of its collaboration with a leading U.S. CRO and reference lab, originally announced in August. During Phase 2, Ares will gain access to 1,000 proprietary genome and AST datasets thereby strategically enriching ARESdb with proprietary data for key pathogens.

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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing threat to public health believed to be causing 700,000 fatalities globally each year and billions of U.S. dollars in healthcare costs. Fueling the growing threat of AMR is the inappropriate use of ineffective antibiotics, impacting patient outcomes and promoting the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant pathogens. Leading global health organizations are therefore calling for antibiotic stewardship through diagnostic innovations that promote the optimal use of antibiotic agents.

Conventional culture-based diagnostics can determine effective antibiotics through antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST); however, they tend to be slow and insensitive. Ares Genetics is addressing this problem from a different angle, using artificial intelligence to accurately predict directly from genomic data if a pathogen is susceptible or resistant to a given antibiotic. Central to this approach are the datasets required to train predictive models, comprised of genome and phenotypic AMR data that have been generated under controlled conditions and a robust model training and testing framework.

Ares Genetics has developed ARESdb, a leading database on AMR, and has published several scientific studies on the performance of its predictive models as well as important considerations of model training. ARESdb not only comprehensively collects known genetic markers for AMR, but also harbors more than 78,000 datasets essential for the development and training of predictive models. This is up by over 40% from around 55,000 datasets a year ago.

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“ARESdb is central to our development of AI-powered applications for AMR prediction” stated Dr. Arne Materna, CEO of Ares Genetics. “It is an essential component of a number of our commercial solutions, including sequencing services offered through our service laboratory located in Vienna, Austria, and the recently launched AREScloud web application aimed at infectious disease experts and professionals in infection prevention and control. We are therefore very pleased to see that our efforts to increase access to clinically relevant and proprietary data through strategic collaborations is proving successful.”

The value of ARESdb and machine learning for predicting antibiograms from genomic data is increasingly recognized by key opinion leaders around the world and has recently materialized in a strategic data access transaction under which a global corporation and leader in microbiology and infectious disease diagnostics was granted access to a narrowly defined subset of ARESdb corresponding to 1.1% of the current database contents.

Ares Genetics intends to further increase the value of ARESdb and grow its contents in the coming months and years through strategic collaborations with external partners and by supporting clinical trials conducted by its affiliates at OpGen. OpGen CEO Oliver Schacht added: “Ares will also be applying its next generation sequencing and AI-powered bioinformatics capabilities to analyze the clinical patient samples collected during OpGen’s Unyvero UTI clinical trial in the U.S. which will further expand the unique and proprietary contents of ARESdb. We expect Ares to become one of the key drivers of growth for OpGen in the coming years as we also seek to expand the commercial footprint and activities of Ares in the U.S. beginning in January of 2022.”

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