Canadian biotechnology startup Afynic laboratoriesA spin -out from McMaster University in Ontario, picked up $ 5 million in seed financing to market a blood test for endometriosis – a medical condition that can afflict people with a uterus, causing problems such as than chronic pelvic pain and fertility problems.
Endometriosis affects nearly 200 million people worldwide. Getting a diagnosis remains difficult, some women reporting that it can take years – even up to a decade – doctors’ trips and invasive tests before obtaining confirmation. This in turn delays the treatments that could alleviate their pain or improve their chances of being able to get pregnant. The acceleration of diagnosis, treatments can therefore occur more quickly, is the mission of Afynia.
The co-founder, Dr. Lauren Foster (photo above on the left), explains that endometriosis is not a single medical problem, but rather a syndrome or a series of different disorders which may have similar symptoms. Before doing the startup, Foster was a professor at McMaster for more than two decades after a career start as a researcher.
The startup approach to detect endometriosis responds to this complexity by examining a range of biomarkers. More specifically, its technology is based on the patient’s blood test for the presence of microarn – tiny molecules that play a role in activating genes or deactivated.
Microarn panel
The microarn test of Afynia, which he calls endomir, works by looking for a panel of these molecules using an algorithm to compare the level of expression of the microarn which circulates in the patient’s blood to people with confirmed endometriosis surgical to reach a diagnosis.
“We admitted that we had to go beyond a single biomarker and watch a panel – a panel that would have more consistency and reliability to collect endometriosis of different types and at different stages of the disease,” said at Techcrunch at Techcrunch.
“The biomarkers that we examine cover different aspects of the disease. Thus, they could be involved in new growth in blood vessels, they are involved in inflammation, they are involved in a new nervous growth factor or new peripheral nervous growth linked to pain – and therefore targeting these different parts From the disease, they work better together in combination than anyone alone. »»
“We use markers that reflect these different physiological functions of the disease, but we assemble them in a single panel, and we use our algorithm to determine whether or not they represent a risk of illness or not” adds.
She maintains that a test based on microarn is a better way to do so than other approaches – like trying to detect endometriosis by testing proteins – because the traces are more stable.
An approach to Microarn also allowed the startup to find “the combination of markers who seem to work well together” to collect endometriosis, by favor and a sustained understanding “what are confusing or interferent factors”.
“Some of our competitors-it seems that they do not appreciate it,” she suggests.
Outside the academic world
While Afynia (Previously called Aima)) was founded in November 2021, Foster says that Endomir test technology is based on the long term of its research career focused on ovarian regulations and endometriosis – which, since around 2015, also included research of microarn.
Foster was previously involved in order to patent a protein biomarker for granting licenses to a pharmaceutical company in Europe. But she says that the process of processing a commercial entity that had no academic earthquake in science was frustrating. Consequently, with his doctoral student and now co-founder, Dr Jocelyn Wessel (also represented in the image of functionality above), they decided to take the intellectual property they had developed on microarn and train their own company in order to market a non -invasive endometriosis test (in the sense of not requiring surgical diagnosis).
The use of microarn for the basis of disease tests is not new, and is not based on microarn panels for diagnosis – and others also try this type of approach to collect endometriosis – But Afynia thinks it has an advantage because it attacks the problem from the problem of the problem from the problem of a base of already having an academic discovery. (Rather than the typical approach with many startups that try to develop a solution to solve a commercial value problem they have identified.)
“We are really the first group, I think, who found it as part of a university laboratory, admitted its usefulness and decided to put it on the market,” said the startup doctor, Dr. Jake Prigoff.
“It was a research career, work there and head slowly to the microarn,” adds Foster, describing the “Ah-ha moment” which encouraged him to get out of the university world in the commercial field. She says that Le Penny fell after having been able to show that microarn tests blind on the patient’s blood samples had a “very high level of agreement” with what surgeons took thanks to invasive tests.
“”[Those results told us] We have something here that is interesting and is worth continuing, ”she continues. “And obviously, there was much more work after that, to continue to explore, to refine, improve the reliability of the test, sensitivity.”
The startup refuses to disclose any measure on the accuracy of its endomir test compared to the surgical diagnosis when we ask for it – saying that it wishes to keep its data under the wraps until it is finished going through the process of ‘Canada regulatory approval for a laboratory developed test (LDT).
As part of this process, he will put his algorithm by clinical validation to demonstrate the clinical validity of the expected use cases – by focusing on the diagnosis of patients with chronic pelvic pain or infertility, which are both Who indicate that treatments are available to manage or improve symptoms if faster could have tangible advantages for patients.
Prigoff says that the team is convinced that it will be able to market the test in North America later this year – they hope that the LDT will be approved in the next three months.
Canada would be the first market in the Afynia test is deployed – potentially this summer – with a launch in the United States scheduled for next year if everything goes as planned.
A better result for patients?
“The average patient can wait seven to eight years for a diagnosis [of endometriosis]And some of them more than a decade. And so even if we cannot quantify exactly the quantity of reduction that we will be able to bring to these patients, we are convinced that we will be able to considerably reduce this calendar, ”adds Prigoff.
The need for a patient to have his blood carried out for the Afynia test is a limit to scalability. But he suggests that there is a positive aspect here in terms of patient confidence – arguing that diagnostic efforts that are concentrated elsewhere (and do not require needles), for example that the use of ultrasound And image analysis or even tests of traces of molecule in saliva, may suffer from a lack of confidence in patients and clinicians responsible for the control of tests.
“We believe that we have in a way the best combination of differentiation factors to be the market leader here,” he said. “The key is the confidence of the patients and a balance between the level of invasiveness, if you want, and precision. Patients trust a blood test. And I think they are a little skeptical of things like saliva tests and, you know, the imaging relationships generated by AI. And I think clinicians are too. »»
Another “differentiation factor” claims that prigoff is the cost, which suggests: “We do this in a way that allows us to extend beyond where I think that some of the prices of our competitors will have to land – depending on the technology they »re using. “”
Further on, while the startup continues to develop its microarn technology, PRIGOFF also says that they hope that the test could work with just a drop of blood (that is to say a finger bite), rather than requiring a blood sample. Although he points out that this is not yet possible.
While endometriosis is the place where Afynia puts all its energy for the moment, the startup wishes to apply its approach to diagnose the health problems of other women – with a plan to put on the market a pipeline of Microarn tests in the coming years. Although it remains to trigger what can happen other than Prigoff says that they want patents to be deposited before making public with additional tests.
Competitors also hunting the promise of non -invasive tests for female health problems include the tastes of California NextGen Janewhich explores using menstrual blood collected via stamps to test endometriosis and other health problems; And DotlabAnother American player, who has developed a blood test for endometriosis.
TV platforms like Allara and research projects like Citizen Endo Also seek to respond to people with endometriosis with support to manage their conditions or improve understanding of the disease.
Afynia’s seeds were led by Bio-Rad Laboratories, a laboratory kit manufacturer, with the participation of the Impact America, SOSV, Capital Angel Network and Gaingels.
Before this funding, Foster said that the startup had raised approximately 1.5 million dollars in pre-ted funding, with support for its previous increase in McMaster University and some of its seeds in seeds, including SOSV and Capital Angel Network, as well as investors from new York
