Assisted by ASBTDC Lead Center at UA Little Rock
Consultant Rebecca Todd
UAMS Spinout Gets Funding for Early Malaria Detection
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences spinout company CytoAstra successfully started its activity by winning a two-year, $600,000 Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Malaria is a global health priority, with almost half of the world’s population (3.2 billion) at risk and around 500,000 deaths per year. Current sensitivity of malaria blood sample tests confirm only clinical symptoms often at the advanced disease stage when it is too late for effective patient treatment, especially among children.
CytoAstra and its UAMS subaward partner will be developing a new concept for deadly disease diagnosis using an advanced technical platform called cytophone. The focus of this NIH STTR Phase I project is on early detection of malaria; later it will be used to provide high-sensitivity detection of melanoma and stroke.
CytoAstra Team
CytoAstra, a tenant of the UAMS BioVentures incubator, was co-founded by Drs. James Suen, MD and Vladimir Zharov, PhD, DSc.
Dr. Suen, CEO, is a distinguished UAMS professor and surgeon with enormous clinical experience in cancer (former director of UAMS Cancer Center) and accompanied diseases. Dr. Zharov, CSO is a UAMS professor and director of the UAMS Arkansas Nanomedicine Center.
Both will lead an interdisciplinary team of laser, ultrasound, and software engineers, biologists, and physicians in this STTR Phase I project.
Consultants Rebecca Todd of the UA Little Rock Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center and Sharon Ballard of EnableVentures helped with the company’s federal registrations and NIH STTR proposal preparation. They will continue to assist CytoAsta with future NIH STTR proposals, market research, business strategy planning and federal reports.
Company History and Technology
Dr. Zharov and his UAMS team have been developing cytophone technology using an in vivo photoacoustic flow cytometry diagnostic platform. They have obtained over $4 million in grants primarily for basic research from the NIH, National Science Foundation, and other agencies. Outcomes of this research resulted in more than 60 publications in the world’s most prestigious journals including nine papers in Nature journals.
The principle of this technology is based on transcutaneous laser irradiation of circulating abnormal cells (e.g., infected or tumor) in peripheral blood vessels. The light absorption on disease-associated intrinsic biomarkers (e.g., hemozoin at malaria or melanin at melanoma) leads to local thermoacoustic or nanobubble-based generation of acoustic waves detected with a small ultrasound transducer attached to the skin. Thus, cytophone provides literally “listening” of laser-activated “cell talks.”
The monitoring of large blood volume allows for dramatic (up to 1,000-fold) increase in sensitivity detection of extremely rare abnormal cells (only a few within an adult’s five-liter whole blood pool).
“Cytophone is a universal diagnostic platform that can be applied for detection of cancer (e.g., melanoma), infections and cardiovascular disorders, including stroke prevention and anticoagulant therapy optimization to reduce risk of bleeding through the counting of circulating clots,” said Zharov.
The feasibility of this technology is protected by three issued patents and one pending. A successful pilot study of this technology with melanoma patients was recently completed.
Current Company Goal
CytoAstra will focus first on the development of its portable, specialized cytophone for early malaria detection. “Our target customers will be the countries in the world where malaria is still a major medical problem and cause of death. This would include many countries in Africa, Asia and South America,” emphasized Suen.
“Cytophone offers 10,000-fold sensitivity improvement for noninvasive label-free diagnosis of asymptomatic individuals that may prevent disease transmission. This method is needle-free, rapid, easy to use and low cost. The FDA recently preliminary identified our patented cytophone platform as a non-significant risk medical device,” said Zharov.
What’s Next for CytoAstra?
“Current support for the feasibility study is only a small fraction of the cost needed to develop commercial prototypes, conduct comprehensive clinical trials and obtain full FDA approval. The company needs much more in future grants and investments to eventually bring our technology to clinical market and to the bedside,” said Suen.
“Other diseases can be detected by molecular targeting of circulating markers using conjugated nanoparticles as high-contrast photoacoustic agents. Cytophone can guide highly localized laser destruction of circulating tumor and infected cells to potentially prevent metastasis and sepsis,” said Zharov.
Research reported in this release was supported by The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under grant number [1R41AI138690-01]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.