The Problem
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects 15.9 million U.S. adults, and costs $49 billion annually to treat and manage. When COPD patients are exposed to lung irritants like viral or bacterial infections, air pollution, or smoke, it can trigger an acute exacerbation (AE), in which their symptoms quickly become more severe. AE is the leading cause of mortality and emergency hospital admission from COPD. Even though earlier intervention increases the likelihood of preventing serious complications and future events, there is currently no accurate diagnostic test for AEs. Furthermore, the current standard of care is to prescribe antibiotics to patients with moderate AE-COPD to retrospectively diagnose for infection, which may contribute to antibiotic resistance, additional complications, and prolonged hospitalization.
Our Solution
Together with clinical collaborators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, we are developing COPDx: a point-of-care diagnostic test that can enable clinicians to rapidly triage COPD patients. COPDx detects an array of biomarkers to identify patients who are at high risk of AE and determine its cause, reducing costs and saving lives.
Wyss Effect
In 2022, as the Wyss Diagnostics Accelerator (DxA) program got underway, Rushdy Ahmad, Ph.D., Director of the Wyss DxA, and Trey Toombs, Ph.D., Wyss DxA Head of Operations, reached out to clinicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), asking them to submit their biggest pain points when practicing medicine. The team received more than 50 responses identifying clear unmet patient needs.
Ahmad then called on the Wyss community identify existing technologies or capabilities at the Wyss that could be leverage to create new solutions to improve patients’ lives for the most pressing of these challenges, one of them being COPD. In parallel, the Wyss’ Biomarker Discovery Lab (BDL) was enlisted to identify new biomarkers for AE and Wyss members Tiffany Lin, Ph.D., and Mike Super, Ph.D., devised an approach to develop a point-of-care test for AE.
The two teams, complementing one another, joined forces and were part of the class of 2023 Validation Projects. The team made great progress in developing a novel diagnostic that they also were awarded second-year Validation Project funding in 2024.
The COPDx team is highly collaborative, drawing expertise from multiple labs and platforms at the Wyss Institute to tackle the complex and heterogeneous nature of COPD. Gretchen Fougere, Ph.D., Wyss Senior Director of Business Development, has also been instrumental in helping the team focus the research on translation.
Super and Lin are now leveraging engineered lectin technology developed in the lab of Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Wyss Founding Director, to capture and identify pathogens from COPD patient samples and to help guide optimal antibiotic use.
Lin is also working with Michel Nofal, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Peng Yin, Ph.D., and Shira Roth, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of David Walt, Ph.D., along with Instrumentation Engineers, Susan Marquez and Thomas Ferrante to develop a prototype of a low-cost, tabletop diagnostic tool leveraging novel protein detection techniques.
To address the difficulty of collecting samples from patients who are actively experiencing AEs, the team is collaborating with Craig Hersh, M.D. at BWH to develop a novel and noninvasive method to model AEs in COPD patients, so that they can evaluate the real-world performance of their diagnostic and discover novel biomarkers for AE.
Impact
The team envisions an accurate and inexpensive diagnostic for use in primary care physicians’ offices and in urgent care clinics, reducing the need to send samples to a central lab and speeding up the time to diagnose patients in need.
With the conclusion of their second year of Validation Project funding in May 2025, the COPDx team is currently seeking funding from philanthropic or pharmaceutical partners to further develop their prototype and conduct clinical validation trials.