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.”

The new company, bioVidria, was started by Mary Wirth, UA Professor of Chemistry and a BIO5 member. BioVidria takes microarrays―slides containing collections of molecules that are used to detect other molecules, including those whose presence indicates disease―and coats them with a very thin layer of silica nanoparticles. The nanoparticle-coated microarrays are 10 times more sensitive than microarrays without the coating, and so they can detect much smaller concentrations of molecules―and thus potentially also detect cancers and other diseases sooner than is currently possible. The coated microarrays can also aid in developing drugs to treat diseases, and they can help with other forms of chemical analysis.
Potential bioVidria customers include pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies from around the world, as well as academic researchers. The Arizona Board of Regents recently gave its approval for Wirth, who developed the coating while a researcher at the university, to take on ownership of the company.

“All of us know people who’ve died of cancer, and if only the disease had been caught earlier, they would have survived,” Wirth says. “This technology is designed to achieve earlier diagnosis, so that more diseases are diagnosed at a stage where they’re curable.”

“BioVidria will allow research into drug discovery and disease detection to be done more robustly,” adds BIO5 Business Director Nina Ossanna, who is the senior licensing associate for the UA’s Office of Technology Transfer. “This is a fundamental technology with a lot of applications.”

The coating Wirth developed consists of particles only a few hundred nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide―just one hundredth the width of a strand of human hair.  Because the silica nanoparticles are so small, a huge number of them fit into even bioVidria’s very thin coating, and a coating of so many small particles, working together, can detect more sensitively than conventional materials.

Usually cramming so many small particles together causes other problems―collectively the particles tend to become opaque rather than transparent, in much the way a fiber optic cable looks milky even though the individual fibers that comprise it are clear. An opaque coating would block rather than enhance the detection of molecules. But it turns out that so long as the silica nanoparticles are all the same size, they organize themselves into a crystalline pattern that allows them to remain transparent, even in large quantities.

Biovidria is on the verge of product launch, with product samples being beta tested by prospective customers. Wirth decided to found bioVidria in order to assure her work gets out where it can do the most good. “It’s a big step to form a company because it takes an enormous amount of your time,” Wirth says. “But if you have an idea that is useful it’s your duty to make it available.”

Wirth worked with the UA Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) and BIO5 to patent the silica coating and license it to bioVidria. “She [Wirth] expressed interest in starting a company, and so we supported her in doing that,” says Pat Jones, Director of OTT. “We also introduced her to the Arizona Center for Innovation (AZCI) to help set up the company. It was a very nice collaboration between OTT, BIO5, AZCI and a researcher.”

BioVidria’s manufacturing will remain in Tucson. “That’s one benefit of having a research university in our community,” Ossanna says. “New technology starts new companies that employ people here.” Three new biotechnology companies based on UA faculty research have received Arizona Board of Regents approval over the past few months. “BIO5 and OTT support starting companies that bring technology beyond the university for the public’s benefit,” Ossanna says.

“Academic research has a really big effect on people’s lives,” Wirth adds. “Virtually everything you see around you has been improved by academic research.”