For immediate release
Contact: Bill Lubinger
216.368.4443
william.lubinger@case.edu
$2.5M small business innovation grant to advance medical technology invented at Case Western Reserve University
Finding cells faster could lead to more effective therapies
CLEVELAND—Targeting and treating diseases first requires being able to find specific cells—which is challenging because they travel within the body and can “hide.”
Now, a new round of funding will support advancing technology invented at Case Western Reserve University that enhances the ability to locate therapeutic cells or diseased cells like cancer.
“Right now, we don’t know where all the cells go when tracking cancer cells or cell-based therapies, so we are not sure what type of processes to target or how therapies might be improved,” said Susann Brady-Kalnay, the Sally S. Morley Designated Professor of Brain Tumor Research and professor of molecular biology and microbiology at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine.
Toward that goal, the National Institutes of Health awarded a $2.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant jointly to Brady-Kalnay and BioInVision Inc.
The Cleveland-based, Case Western Reserve spinout company was co-founded by double-alumni and Chief Executive Officer 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 post-doc from the CWRU biomedical engineering department.
The technology is intended to serve various applications, such as testing cancer therapeutics, 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 collaborate with universities for continued research and commercialization, bringing revenue to both the company and 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 tissue and organs from three-dimensional volumes of various models. The CryoViz cryo-imaging device is a highly automated system that uses a microscope, robotics, imaging and advanced software to create high-resolution, three-dimensional images of biological samples with 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 AI algorithm BioInVision is developing, imaging an entire mouse—including identifying all its organs—could take a matter of hours.”
The researchers will also employ an AI-based “virtual staining” approach to evaluate the body’s tissue at a single-cell level. The new techniques allow them to track individual cells—like migrating and metastatic cancer cells or T-cells—to evaluate cell-based treatments like immunotherapy.
“The computer can decide when it has detected some “glowing” fluorescent cells, like metastatic tumor cells in the lung,” Brady-Kalnay said. “It will automatically save tissue sections in that region so I can go back and study the tissue in detail at the cellular and molecular level.”
David Wald, co-investigator on the grant and professor of pathology at CWRU, is studying where T-cells end up in various organs during novel treatments like immunotherapy. Doing so would improve the ability to target diseased cells.
More broadly, the grant represents the importance of academic-industrial 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 started by Case Western Reserve students, postdocs and faculty members are often run by former university postdocs and graduate students.
BioInVision has been selling its CryoViz technology as an instrument and service to academic institutions, hospitals, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies globally for over a decade, raising Ohio's visibility internationally.
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