Targeting and treating disease first requires being able to find specific cells – which is difficult because they travel around the body and can “hide”.
Now, a new round of funding will support advanced technology invented at Case Western Reserve University that enhances the ability to identify therapeutic cells or diseased cells such as cancer.
“Right now, we don’t know where all the cells go when tracking cancer cells or cell-based therapies, so we’re not sure what type of processes to target or how treatments might be improved.”
Susann Brady-Kalnay, Sally S. Morley Distinguished Professor of Brain Tumor Research and Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Case Western Reserve School of Medicine
Toward this goal, the National Institutes of Health jointly awarded a $2.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to Brady-Kalnay and BioInVision Inc.
The Cleveland-based spinout Case Western Reserve was co-founded by dual alumni and CEO Debashish Roy and David Wilson, the Robert J. Herbold Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology and the company’s chief technology officer. Madhu Gargesha, BioInVision’s principal investigator for this research grant, is a former postdoctoral fellow from CWRU’s biomedical engineering department.
The technology is intended to serve a variety of applications, such as testing cancer treatments, cell-based therapies, including immunotherapy, and drug delivery. The technology can also be used to evaluate imaging agents and gene expression, Brady-Kalnay said.
SBIR grants support small businesses that partner with universities for ongoing research and commercialization, bringing revenue to both the company and the university while boosting regional economic development.
More specifically, the new grant will fund research that advances the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and “machine learning” software to identify healthy and diseased tissues and organs from 3D tumors of various models. The CryoViz cryoimaging device is a highly automated system that uses microscopy, robotics, imaging, and advanced software to create high-resolution, 3D images of biological specimens at single-cell sensitivity.
“If you wanted to do this with traditional methods, it might take millions of tissue sections,” Brady-Kalnay said. “Using a new artificial intelligence algorithm BioInVision is developing, imaging an entire mouse, including identifying all its organs, can take a few hours.”
The researchers will also use an AI-based “virtual staining” approach to assess body tissue at the single-cell level. The new techniques allow them to track individual cells that migrate and metastasize cancer cells or T-cells to evaluate cell therapies such as immunotherapy.
“The computer can decide when it has detected some ‘bright’ fluorescent cells, such as metastatic tumor cells in the lung,” Brady-Kalnay said. “It will automatically save sections of tissue in that area so I can go back and study the tissue in detail at the cellular and molecular level.”
David Wald, a co-investigator on the grant and professor of pathology at CWRU, studies where T-cells end up in various organs during new treatments such as immunotherapy. Doing so will improve the ability to target diseased cells.
More broadly, the grant represents the importance of academic-industry partnerships in supporting technology development and commercialization in Ohio. It also demonstrates the success of spin-out companies and Case Western Reserve’s role in training STEM professionals for the biotech industry. Companies founded by Case Western Reserve students, postdocs, and faculty members are often run by former postdocs and graduate students.
BioInVision has been selling CryoViz technology as a tool and service to academic institutions, hospitals, biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide for over a decade, raising Ohio’s profile internationally.
