We are targeting the greatest needs to drive the greatest positive impact on patients' lives, delivering the bench to the bedside.
The Wyss DxA’s clinical partners from Brigham and Women’s Hospital identify the most pressing unmet diagnostic needs, provide access to high-quality patient samples for our Biomarker Discovery Laboratory (BDL) and Brigham-Wyss DxA collaborators, and provide invaluable feedback and guidance on the engineering and validation of cost-effective, sensitive, and specific diagnostic tests.
Our acceleration process begins with clinicians who identify critical unmet medical diagnostic needs. They then work alongside Wyss scientists and engineers to help develop technologies to address these specific problems. As promising technologies are developed in Wyss labs, they are brought to the CLIA-certified lab at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital to be tested with real patient samples. The CLIA designation is granted by the FDA and sets clinical standards for clinical laboratory testing performed on human samples, which means these Wyss-developed technologies are being used under similar standards that the FDA uses when evaluating products for approval in the market. The Wyss teams then use clinician feedback to further refine and enhance these technologies before bringing them back to the CLIA lab.
Our Current Projects
More than 50 unmet diagnostic needs have been identified by clinical collaborators so far, and three are currently being pursued through collaboration with Wyss scientists.
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Early Diagnosis for Lyme DiseaseTo detect the disease at its earliest stages, a team assembled by Wyss Faculty members Natalie Artzi, James Collins, and David Walt is developing a diagnostic point-of-care method able to sample the Lyme pathogen’s DNA from the skin of patients and amplify it at room temperature for easy results.
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Ultrasensitive and Multiplexed Diagnostics for Lyme DiseaseThe second Lyme disease project led by Wyss Core Faculty member Peng Yin applies DNA nanotechnology to the detection of the smallest amounts of Lyme disease antigens – small features of the pathogen’s proteins that are recognized by the immune system and can be detected with the group’s SPEAR technique.
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Blood Clot AlarmA high proportion of patients with pleural mesothelioma, a lung cancer triggered by asbestos exposure, are at risk of developing life-threatening blood clots. A team headed by Founding Director Donald Ingber and Raphael Bueno, one of the “top doctors” for this form of cancer in the US, is building a microfluidic monitoring device for the rapid prediction of blood clotting in mesothelioma patients.