Mbio lands $1.8M in grants for water toxicity tests

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is giving Boulder’s Mbio Diagnostics Inc. a combined $1.8 million to advance development of a test to determine whether certain toxins exist in open water.

In a statement, the company said the grants will be used over three years to develop the test to detect more types of toxins created by algae blooms in freshwater bodies, and to aid in securing regulatory approval.

At the moment, the test can detect only two types of algae-caused toxins. The expansion will add two other types of toxins found in algae blooms, including a subset of toxins that lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning if a human eats infested fish.

The test is based on the company’s Lightdeck platform, a broad-based portable system to determine the presence of infections.

Mbio submitted a rapid COVID-19 test based on the platform to the U.S. Department of Defense in June for research purposes. That test searches for the presence of a specific inflammatory protein found in severe COVID patients, rather than searching for samples of the virus’ RNA as the most common tests do.

Mbio merged with fellow Boulder company Brava Diagnostics Inc. in July.