UA News

Chemistry professor Mary J. Wirth is creating products that use technologies at the nano level that serve to improve early disease detection.

Part of the difficulty in detecting diseases like cancer early on is that the instruments available to hunt for the minute proteins indicative of a disease are not advanced enough.

The evidence is often right in the bloodstream but "blood tests are not always sensitive enough," said Mary J. Wirth, a University of Arizona chemistry professor and chemical analyst. "The key is to develop more sensitive tools for research and clinical diagnostics."

Detecting diseases before the onset of symptoms, she said, is one of the greatest challenges in modern-day medicine.

Wirth has long been concerned with this obstacle and, in 2007, launched bioVidria Inc., a company that is developing and manufacturing products that can aid in early disease detection.

She and her colleagues have already developed and begun manfacturing one product that has the potential to help improve disease detection and accelerate the speed at which drugs are discovered. Several others products are currently being developed to launch next year and in 2011.

"Everyone knows someone who has died of cancer because it was diagnosed too late," said Wirth, a BIO5 Institute member, noting that her company is targeting its products to researchers at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

"It's important to get this technology into the hands of those who can use it," Wirth said.

The first, BrightSlides, is a highly sensitive microarray slide that uses platform technology currently being beta tested with several clients.

The slides are made using silica nanoparticles, which don't have the fluorescence background that can interfere with detection.

She uses the moon as an analogy to explain: The moon shines brilliantly in the night sky but, during the day, appears faint. This doesn't mean the moon is reflecting less sunlight but it appears more faint because of the background, or interference from direct sunlight on Earth.

The same concept applies to the technologies being created by Wirth's UA laboratory and company, whose name is a derivative of the Spanish word that means "to glaze."

Common slides are typically opaque and made from glass coated with polymers, which give off their own fluorescent light. But the BrightSlides product includes a thin and far more translucent layer Wirth developed using silica nanoparticles. 

These provide for surface areas better able to capture biomarkers – substances that clue researchers in on the presence of diseases.

"What is so nice about silica is that it is prevalent in the earth, so these are very inexpensive to make," said Wirth, who received a $120,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant earlier this year from the National Institutes of Health to help advance her work.

BioVidria has licensed the intellectual property from the UA and is now working to make the product rugged enough for routine use, Wirth said. The market potential for a stronger product is huge, she added. 

The American Cancer Society reports that cancer is the second leading cause of death in The United States. The organization estimates that more than 500,000 men and women in the United States will die this year from some form of cancer.

Wirth said she is hopeful that the work at bioVidria will not only lead to better instruments to detect diseases, and to detect them earlier, but that they would also help to save lives. But she said it would have been difficult to get this far if not for the help of the Arizona Center for Innovation, or AzCI.

"Without AzCI, this company would not have blossomed into what it is now," Wirth said.

She has on met with potential investors several times this month to help commercialize creations that come out of her company, which is located at the Arizona Center for Innovation. The center, known as AzCi, a business incubator that partners with the UA and is located at the University's Science and Technology Park. 

And earlier this month, she was involved in the center's Investor Showcase, which enabled 12 UA and Tucson-area companies to make pitches to investors who could financially help them to take their ideas and products to market.

"It was so helpful to be taught by people who know the elements of business," she said, "and people in the industry who could help out and guide you through the process."