Significant Need

One of the characteristics of patients who are very sick with COVID19 is the cytokine release syndrome, a strong activation of the immune system. Several medications that have been developed for treating arthritis, psoriasis, and other immune conditions target specific cytokines, which are protein messengers that drive the immune response.

Some of these agents are being tested in clinical trials for COVID19, including at Michigan Medicine. However, although we can use routine clinical labs to monitor the overall level of inflammation in the body, current tests for specific cytokines take several days to return, which is too slow for them to contribute to medical decision making. Information about which cytokines are elevated and when might help clinicians make decisions about how best to treat patients who are critically ill due to COVID19.

Solution

In our project we will use an ultra-rapid, ultra-sensitive cytokine detection platform that has been developed by Dr. Katsuo Kurabayashi. We have utilized this platform successfully in doing retrospective analysis of patients with cytokine release syndrome in the setting of other medical conditions. Now, we are going to be conducting a clinical study of performing cytokine measurements in near real-time and returning the results to clinicians on the same day to help with decision making. We don't make any specific recommendations regarding treatment, but hope to fill a knowledge vacuum for clinicians treating critically ill COVID19 patients.

Competitive Advantage

The platform that Dr. Kurabayashi has developed is extremely robust, reliable and fast. While other platforms that are in the marketplace can perform cytokine measurements within an hour, they often require investments in equipment that are tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to the assay technology itself, Dr. Kurabayashi is developing simple, low cost technology for performing and reading the assay. We hope that this platform will be cost effective enough to widely deploy near the patient, rather than in a laboratory, to bring precision medicine to patients in a wide variety of conditions and in future pandemics.

Commercialization Path

This project’s development is partially supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No: CBET 1931905).

Provisional patent: New U.S. Provisional Patent Application Serial No.: 62/936,147
Filed: 15-Nov-2019
Applicant: The Regents of the University of Michigan
Inventors: Katsuo Kurabayashi; Muneesh Tewari; Sung Won Choi; Yujing Song; Shiuan-Haur Su 
Title: SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR RAPID, SENSITIVE MULTIPLEX IMMUNOASSAYS.

If you are interested in supporting work on this project, contact the Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation.

Banner image credit: Scientific Animations