Imagine this: You’re atop a football stadium and are tasked with counting the stadium occupancy on a game night. Here are two options: You wait for the whole stadium to fill up, and using high power cameras on individual sections of the stadium, you take a headcount. The other option is instead of trying to counting from up above, every person who gets in wears a spotlight on their head. Then, you measure the light coming out of the stadium where light serves as a proxy for the number of people.
Now in the analogy, let's replace people with bacteria and the stadium with your body.
If you're in the camp that thinks the second option is more efficient, you get the essence of and the purpose behind Charlestown-based SeLux Diagnostics, which is building a diagnostics platform that enables delivery of personalized therapies to patients with bacterial infection.
"We bring personalized medicine and a treatment regimen specific to patients with infectious diseases," said Eric Stern, CEO and CTO of SeLux Diagnostics.
All of us have been in situations where we're prescribed strong doses of antibiotics with bouts of nausea and stomach ache as common side effects. But what if we didn't need a strong dose?
"Before a medical practitioner gets test results from the lab, they are basically shooting in the dark about the right antibiotic to prescribe," Stern said. "They're not going to take chances and will prescribe the patients the strongest medicine in their arsenal."
What are the real side effects though? The antibiotics killing healthy cells.
"We want to give antibiotics that won’t have such potent side effects," Stern said. "The more you can limit the exposure to these agents to healthy cells [it can], better the chances of avoiding side effects."
According to Stern, the right kind of information provided to a health care professional in a speedy manner to can avoid this. And that's what his company, SeLux Diagnostics is working on.
Why hasn't this been implemented yet? The short answer is the waiting time for lab reports. The long answer is that once the bacteria has been identified, figuring out what drug works best is doable -- by testing how well the strain of bacteria will grow against an array of drugs. But since lab reports take time to be processed, in the absence of that information, patients are usually prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics, which is used against a wide array of disease-causing bacteria, when an infection is detected but the bacteria is strain is unknown or unidentified.
Some examples of broad-spectrum antibiotics include amoxicillin and ampicillin. Patients get prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics for bacterial infections ranging from bronchitis to ear infections to sexually transmitted diseases.
What are the risks then? One is the effect it has on the body's normal microbial makeup - simply put, these can destroy normal body flora or good bacteria along with the bad. Second is that, over time, the bacteria mutates and evolves to develop resistance.
"When it [bacteria] gets exposed to the broad-spectrum antibiotics, it’s an existential threat to that bacteria and it is going to undergo mutation to resist the drug," Stern said. "The more broad-spectrum antibiotics used, the more chances the bacteria has to evolve and develop resistance."
Stern explained that the medical industry today is stuck with two choices: to either use a slow but cost-effective method or a quick but expensive solution.
This is where SeLux's science unfolds: The company uses a small fluorescent molecule that binds to the surface of the bacteria. Since most bacterial surfaces are negatively charged, SeLux built a molecule that’s positive and very bright. The molecule when mixed the bacteria amplifies the presence of the bacteria and thus enabling discovery and visibility at an early stage of detection.
"Think of it as bacteria counting technology," Stern noted.
And the company claims it can provide this information two days faster than labs today can. Going back to the football stadium analogy, SeLux is measuring the amplification of light to measure the bacteria.
The four-year-old company has raised almost $36 million in venture capital so far and employs a staff of 25 full-time employees. The company plans to do a clinical trial later this year for FDA approval.
Last year, SeLux Diagnostics won a contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for up to $45 million. The company received $9.3 million from the contract to fund the clinical trial necessary for developing its next-generation phenotyping platform and the additional $36 million to fund the development of its second-generation rapid sepsis diagnostic system. Another company to receive BARDA funding is Cambridge-based Moderna Therapeutics.
