The Justice

Wangh

Prof. Lawrence Wangh (BIOL) and Smiths Detection Diagnostics have received a grant from the National Institute of Health to collaborate on the development of an assay, or biochemical screening test, for pathogens including at least eight of the most common organisms that cause sepsis, an illness in which bacteria proliferate in the blood.

"[The assay uses] a new platform technology for molecular diagnostics and is very powerful in terms of its specificity and the amount of information it generates in a single tube," said Wangh.

Wangh's laboratory started out as a group of reproductive biologists investigating the genetics of single cells from mouse and human embryos and made a fundamental discovery in a lab procedure called the polymerase chain reaction. PCR is a method for "amplifying" genetic material, or replicating a small sample of DNA to quantities usable in experiments.

The discovery, patented as linear-after-the-exponential PCR, "opened a window for how to amplify DNA more conveniently and more specifically than was available using standard PCR methods," explained Wangh. After this discovery, Wangh's lab entered into a long-term partnership with Smiths, a U.K.-based company that provides threat detection and screening for military, transportation, medical and homeland security applications.

President of Diagnostics for Smiths Detection Bill Mawer wrote in an e-mail to the Justice that the dynamic between the company and Wangh's laboratory at Brandeis will change from what it was since the start of their collaboration in 2004.

"Having an NIH grant introduces particular reporting requirements which are different from what we do now. We are working with Larry Wangh on a plan to separate the work that is dedicated to the NIH projects from the more general research work and manage each in an appropriate way," Mawer wrote.

Smiths Detection Diagnostics is working to develop two versions of a machine-one portable and another for hospitals-that will run the assays for the dangerous bacteria without much input from human operators.

"The beauty of [an automated assay] is that the amount of training required for the operator is minimized, and the reproducibility of the assays is more reliable," said Wangh.

"One of the big problems in diagnostics is often individual operators do it slightly differently, so by standardizing and making it automated, we minimize the operator issues," Wangh said.

Continued...

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