Written by George William Ssendagala, Edited by Charlotte Pugsley, Caroline Babisz and Rachel Thompson.
Unaffordable, imprecise, and an untimely disease diagnosis undermines the global healthcare system, contributing to increased morbidity and mortality. The rising prevalence of diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders need a timely diagnosis for better management. New drug therapies for chronic diseases are needed and being developed, but currently, the cost of development through screening and trials of compounds is prohibitive, restricting patient access. Through their novel technology, ChronosDx is developing a promising bioassay to circumvent these challenges.
ChronosDx is a UK-based startup; one of six participating in this year's SEC Innovators' Club. l had the opportunity to sit down with one of its co-founders, Ella, to discuss this startup's current and future perspectives.
Dr Ella Mi is a medical oncologist from the University of Oxford with research expertise in early cancer detection. She is a health tech and pharma consultant and has been involved in commercialising and regulating medical devices. By her side is Dr James Tyrrell, who recently received his PhD from Imperial College London. His research focused on organic electrochemical transistors and their applications in neurophysiological disorder detection.
ChronosDx is developing a biosensing platform that can detect various biomarkers. Biomarkers are indicative biological molecules that, upon quantification and evaluation, can inform an individual's health state. Diagnostic, monitoring, pharmacodynamic, predictive, prognostic, safety, and risk are the seven categories of biomarkers [1]. However, these can simply be mRNA, tumour cells, genes, lipids, and hormones from body fluids or tissues. Working on an inbuilt threshold, the number of detected biomarkers can provide answers to whether an individual's health is at risk or not.
According to Ella, ChronosDx aims to build one biosensor that can detect multiple types of biomarkers. Attuning this platform to pick up single molecules for exquisite sensitivity is the other key feature to their technology. She asserted that "sensitivity, precision, and multi-omics are necessary for next-generation approaches for disease detection, drug screening, and development, and all these are inadequate today". “Improved biosensors such as ours will play a vital role in addressing this gap’’, she added.
Their platform has been designed to serve the needs of the diagnostic and pharmaceutical drug development sectors, forming ChronosDx's market niche. In addition, they hope to collaborate closely with research entities, such as universities, and commercial research and development groups.
Currently in research and development, ChronosDx is working to enhance its platform with the desired functionalities. Their platform consists of two parts: the biological and transistor components. Based in the USA, James is working towards improving the sensitivity of the transistor component courtesy of their pre-seed investor HAX/SOSV. According to their road map, they hope to have the whole architecture of the platform built by the third quarter of 2023.
The beauty of organic electrochemical transistor-based platforms is their versatility in detecting and monitoring a wide variety of biomarkers and, therefore a host of different diseases and drug effects. Ella noted that similar technology has been used for other conditions, so it would not be hard to tailor it for another use case. Beyond that, their platform can also be developed into real-time biosensors embedded in the human body to give continuous data on individual health states. These microfluidic chips could also provide in-vivo data on drug efficacy within desired time frames.
ChronosDx is designing a technology that addresses the limitations of past biosensing platforms through a reduction in size and price whilst maintaining exceptional sensitivity. Their technology will be able to serve not only developed countries but also low and middle-income settings.
[1] Califf, R. M. (2018). Biomarker definitions and their applications. Experimental Biology and Medicine, 243(3), 213–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/1535370217750088
[2] Holtedahl, K. (2020). Challenges in early diagnosis of cancer: The fast track. Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, 38(3), 251–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/02813432.2020.1794415
[3] Tran, K. B., Lang, J. J., Compton, K., Xu, R., Acheson, A. R., Henrikson, H. J., Kocarnik, J. M., Penberthy, L., Aali, A., Abbas, Q., Abbasi, B., Abbasi-Kangevari, M., Abbasi-Kangevari, Z., Abbastabar, H., Abdelmasseh, M., Abd-Elsalam, S., Abdelwahab, A. A., Abdoli, G., Abdulkadir, H. A., … Murray, C. J. L. (2022). The global burden of cancer attributable to risk factors, 2010–19: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 400(10352), 563–591. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01438-6
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