OrisDX, the Chicago startup that wants to test for oral cancers with just a sample of saliva, has won the University of Chicago's prestigious New Venture Challenge competition as it prepares to bring its product to market.
OrisDX recently won first place and $665,000 in funding from UChicago's NVC, an annual student startup competition that's featured past breakout Chicago companies like Grubhub, Braintree, Tovala, SimpleMills and Foxtrot.
OrisDX also won an additional $200,000 from the school's George Shultz Innovation Fund earlier this month.
The startup is creating a non-invasive diagnostics and screening tool to help detect oral, head and neck cancers earlier. Its test looks for tumor DNA and mutations in patient saliva that are specific to cancer and pre-cancer.
The saliva test, which can be conducted at the point of care — either at the dentist office or a patient's primary care doctor — aims to reduce the amount of time it takes to diagnose cancers and reduce costs required from visiting specialists, who would previously need to biopsy a tumor to determine if it was cancerous.
The basis for OrixDX's technology began more than a decade ago from work by physicians and scientists at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University.
Nishant Agrawal, a faculty physical at UChicago and a co-founder of OrisDX, said it was a humbling experience to finish first at UChicago's NVC.
"It was exciting and a bit unexpected, but also very humbling to see the excitement around our hard work," he said.
Eventually the startup would like to develop an over-the-counter device to detect for oral cancer, which could have a similar impact as how Cologuard has had on colon cancer screening.
Last year Andes STR, a startup that makes it easier to invest in and operate Airbnbs and other short term rentals, won first place at UChicago's NVC. And the year prior, Pippin Title, an online real estate land title platform, took home the top prize.
