bioAffinity Technologies has announced a collaboration with Pictor to support development and commercialisation of bioAffinity Technologies’ next-generation diagnostic tests designed to provide a more complete picture of lung inflammation in patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
The tests under development build on bioAffinity's proprietary approach to interrogating the lung microenvironment through sputum analysis, the same scientific platform that powers CyPath Lung, the company's commercially available non-invasive test that helps physicians assess the likelihood that a pulmonary nodule is malignant. The company anticipates that the tests under development will initially be offered as Laboratory Developed Tests (LDTs) under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA).
“Asthma and COPD (pictured) are not single diseases. They encompass multiple inflammatory pathways that require different therapeutic approaches,” said Gordon Downie, MD, PhD, bioAffinity’s Chief Medical Officer. “By measuring immune cell populations using flow cytometry and integrating Pictor’s cytokine profiling platform into its test protocol, our new diagnostics are designed to advance precision medicine in asthma and COPD by providing physicians with a more complete understanding of the biological processes driving airway inflammation in real time.”
bioAffinity Technologies’ flow cytometry platform differentiates and quantifies immune cell populations in sputum while Pictor’s proteomic platform rapidly analyses the inflammatory proteins, or cytokines, produced by those immune cells. The anticipated result is a high-throughput laboratory test for bioAffinity Technologies that is intended to help physicians identify the inflammatory pathways driving an individual patient’s disease and support more informed decisions when considering advanced therapies, including FDA-approved biologics and emerging targeted treatments.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asthma and COPD affect more than 40 million Americans and more than 650 million people worldwide, representing a significant potential market for precision diagnostic tools that provide deeper insights into each patient’s disease and help advance personalised treatment.