Funded Projects - 2020

Smart Surveillance System (S3) for Monitoring Vascular Bypasses/Stents at Home

Principal Investigators

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) in the legs or lower extremities is caused by narrowing or blockage of the vessels that carry blood from the heart to the legs. 8-12 million patients in the US currently have PAD, with 2 million new patients diagnosed annually. In 2013 alone, roughly 400,000 patients underwent stenting or surgical bypass to open blocked arteries and restore blood flow to their legs. Procedures for PAD have poor long-term durability with 25-50% of endovascular procedures failing at one year with only 36% of bypasses and stents able to be salvaged. When stents or bypasses are re-intervened upon before failure, the lifespan of these procedures can be extended significantly. Standard of care surveillance which requires travel to the hospital and expensive testing results in up to 40% non-compliance rates. Thus, despite the recommended 3-6 monthly surveillance visits, PAD procedures fail often leading to emergency operations and even amputations. The proposed Smart Surveillance System (S3) is designed to fill the unmet need for more frequent and convenient surveillance in the patient’s home setting to potentially prevent adverse outcomes. It is a non-invasive, easy to use application that uses infra-red technology and smart algorithms to provide in-home tracking of blood flow in the lower extremities of a patient who has had an endovascular or surgical procedure to treat their condition. The final envisioned product will also provide accurate real-time alerts about patient status sent directly to the physician through the electronic medical record. Thus, S3 has the potential to provide value for patients, providers and payers by reducing emergency surgeries, cutting costs and improving outcomes. Licensing use of the S3 platform to medical device companies as a means to track stent performance is an additional target market.

Mizzou Point-of-care Assessment System (Mizzou PASS): Portable Multi-dimensional Assessment Tool for Management of Concussive Injuries

Principal Investigators

Approximately 3.8 million concussion injuries resulting from sports, motor vehicle accidents and falls occur yearly in the US. Current standard assessments often rely heavily on subjective methods such as symptom self-reporting and measures of static activities that are not fully representative of the spectrum of deficits observed in patients with concussions. So, although a number of these additional constructs evidenced as impaired in concussed patients are correlated with increased subsequent injury risk, accessible and objective clinical devices for their measurement are lacking. The Mizzou Point-of-care Assessment System (Mizzou PASS) is a comprehensive clinical testing platform that has the potential to address this critical need for an affordable assessment system designed to improve concussion management at the point of care. The Mizzou PASS will provide quick, accurate and user-friendly data for medical personnel and patients, improving diagnosis as well as clinical decision making for safe return to activity. The initial target market will encompass the sports medicine arena including rehabilitation and professional/collegiate athletics with the possibility to expand to secondary users such as school athletics, military, as well the geriatric fall and balance market.

TumorTrap: Efficient, Low-cost and Rapid Microfluidic Circulating Tumor Cell Detection Chip

Principal Investigators

In 2019, there were an estimated 1.7 million new cancer cases diagnosed and 606,880 cancer deaths in the United States. While advanced imaging provides important information about a patient’s cancer disease, efficient characterization of radiographically undetectable disease is lacking. For example, treatment in lung cancer is based on invasive tissue biopsies and costly imaging that do not accurately reflect changes of the disease over time. Sensitive and efficient characterization of cancer disease from detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) collected by non-invasive blood draws allow repeated measurements, thereby enabling accurate guidance for disease monitoring and therapeutic planning. However, the current standard of care for CTC detection is expensive, and with limited sensitivity, has inadequate impact on therapy. To address this unmet clinical need, the team is developing an inexpensive, easy-to-use, point-of-care CTC detection platform that will enable quick processing, and even retrieval of viable circulating tumor cells for further analysis. Such a reliable, user-friendly, and widely applicable microfluidics-based system for CTC isolation and characterization that can assist with monitoring disease progression and better tailoring of drugs to patients will have the potential to improve outcomes while reducing costs of care.