Innovation is often a team endeavor, so how do you find and recruit the right teammates?
Thomas Zangle, a University of Utah chemical engineering professor and Huntsman Cancer Institute member, has had a goal of developing a method to measure cancer patients’ responses to drugs in a meaningful way for over 10 years.
Zangle started establishing collaborators right off the bat after being hired at the U in 2016. A colleague connected him with Philip Bernard—a pathology professor, Huntsman Cancer Institute Investigator and medical director of pharmacogenomics at ARUP Laboratories—whose research has long focused on the development of cancer diagnostics.
Rounding out the team, Tarek Moustafa, a graduate student in Zangle’s lab, came to the U from Egypt to pursue his Ph.D. studies. In addition to being an excellent researcher, Moustafa added his experience starting business ventures and living through his grandma’s breast cancer diagnosis.
This team, working with other collaborators including Bryan Welm at HCI, has developed a tool to determine which drug treatments would be most effective for an individual with breast cancer. The tool, based on quantitative phase imaging, uses light to measure a cell’s growth to determine if the cancer cell is growing or shrinking in response to a particular therapy.
“There are around two dozen therapies on the menu that the oncologist can choose between,” Zangle said. “But there’s really no good, broad tests that can give you information on all of them. We're trying to build that test.”
While quantitative phase imaging has been around for decades, what sets the team’s approach apart is its ability to package the results into a score for a particular patient that will help oncologists pick the most effective treatment.
This test could help people like Moustafa’s grandma who have tried multiple treatments without any assurance that they will be effective. In the case of his grandma, she survived after the supplier of one of her chemotherapies changed and the new regimen was more effective. However, “she may have been spared ineffective and toxic therapies using a test like the one we’re developing,” Moustafa said.
The team knew their approach seemed appealing from an academic perspective, but they needed to know if oncologists and patients would really benefit from the test in real life. “You can have the best idea but if the public's not ready to consume it. It doesn't matter,” Bernard said. “We're scientists. We don't usually think about the business aspect of it and although, this is really cool science, does it have the legs to be able to commercialize?”
The Technology Licensing Office suggested the team complete the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) Program to help them identify their customers and develop a business plan. A large part of the program is completing interviews with potential stakeholders—oncologists, patients, etc., in the case of this team.
Moustafa led the effort, interviewing oncologists, CEOs, patient advocates and more. He spent his time cold messaging people on LinkedIn and talking to people while they were driving, flying and running through the hospital. Every interviewee had different opinions and views on the test, but Moustafa was able to learn important lessons that he applied to the test.
The team needed to decide if breast cancer was the best candidate to pursue for the first version of the test. “How much time, money and samples do we need to develop? Do we have enough knowledge about this treatment?” Moustafa said.
After asking these questions and more, they decided to stick with breast cancer. “We know from all of these interviews that there may be types of cancers that could have been a better start but we are already five years into researching breast cancer cells,” Moustafa said. The team also researched competing technologies and determining their strengths and weaknesses in the field. Again, this research pointed to breast cancer being the best option for their test.
The last takeaway from the program was asking who would pay for a new, potentially expensive test. Through the interviews and research, the team discovered that the demographics and income levels of each type of cancer is different. For example, an expensive technology might be better to develop for prostate cancer as opposed to lung cancer because of the differing demographics.
Moustafa, Zangle and Bernard have completed the first two portions of I-Corps Hub West Regional Programming, Zap and Boom, and are preparing for the next steps of their test’s commercialization journey. This includes applying for SBIR/STTR funding, preparing pitch decks for potential investors and generating more data thanks to a recently funded Department of Defense grant. The team also hopes to qualify for the National I-Corps Program and the $50,000 grant that comes with it to pursue more customer discovery efforts. And, on top of all that, Moustafa hopes to graduate in a year.
