Todos evaluating applying its proprietary FTIR platform towards the novel coronavirus
Seeking appropriate partners to get access to patient samples to train its AI platform
REHOVOT, Israel and NEW YORK, March 02, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Todos Medical Ltd. (TOMDF), a pre-commercial stage in-vitro-diagnostics company focused on the development of blood tests for the early detection of cancer and neurodegenerative disorders, today announced the publication of data from a human clinical study in the scientific journal Analytical Chemistry entitled “Differential Diagnosis of the Etiologies of Bacterial and Viral Infections Using Infrared Microscopy of Peripheral Human Blood Samples and Multivariate Analysis”. The data demonstrate that the use of the Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy technique on peripheral blood samples yields a differential diagnosis when seeking to make a clinical diagnosis between patients with viral infections, bacterial infections and healthy controls.
“With the recent explosion of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) worldwide, definitively diagnosing viral infections versus bacterial or other types of infections that present with similar symptoms has become paramount in order to appropriately triage patients and guide treatment decisions for healthcare professionals,” said Gerald Commissiong, President & CEO of Todos Medical. “Todos’ proprietary FTIR blood testing platform that focuses on the immune system’s reaction to cancer has received CE Marks in Europe for the diagnosis of breast cancer and colon cancer, has recently achieved strong analytical performance results from our proprietary sample preparation methods, and is currently enrolling a pre-commercial breast cancer study in Romania with distribution partner Orot+ (a division of Orot Luces) ahead of an expected commercial launch in Romania later this year. Based on these recent successes and this publication from the Company’s licensors at Ben Gurion University, we have now formally begun to evaluate the commercial feasibility of applying our technology towards the diagnosis of bacterial and viral infections, including coronavirus. Because we use AI to create the algorithms required to differentially diagnosis cancer, we believe the rate limiting step towards creating algorithms for viral and bacterial infections on our platform is access to sufficient viral and bacterial patient samples in order create those new algorithms. As such, we have begun outreach efforts to determine the potential of obtaining such samples from coronavirus-affected jurisdictions.”
ABSTRACT ( https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.8b00017 )
Human viral and bacterial infections are responsible for a variety of diseases that are still the main causes of death and economic burden for society across the globe. Despite the different responses of the immune system to these infections, some of them have similar symptoms, such as fever, sneezing, inflammation, vomiting, diarrhea, and fatigue. Thus, physicians usually encounter difficulties in distinguishing between viral and bacterial infections on the basis of these symptoms. Rapid identification of the etiology of infection is highly important for effective treatment and can save lives in some cases. The current methods used for the identification of the nature of the infection are mainly based on growing the infective agent in culture, which is a time-consuming (over 24 h) and usually expensive process. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of the mid-infrared spectroscopic method for rapid and reliable identification of bacterial and viral infections based on simple peripheral blood samples. For this purpose, white blood cells (WBCs) and plasma were isolated from the peripheral blood samples of patients with confirmed viral or bacterial infections. The obtained spectra were analyzed by multivariate analysis: principle component analysis (PCA) followed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA), to identify the infectious agent type as bacterial or viral in a time span of about 1 h after the collection of the blood sample. Our preliminary results showed that it is possible to determine the infectious agent with high success rates of 82% for sensitivity and 80% for specificity, based on the WBC data.
Seeking appropriate partners to get access to patient samples to train its AI platform
REHOVOT, Israel and NEW YORK, March 02, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Todos Medical Ltd. (TOMDF), a pre-commercial stage in-vitro-diagnostics company focused on the development of blood tests for the early detection of cancer and neurodegenerative disorders, today announced the publication of data from a human clinical study in the scientific journal Analytical Chemistry entitled “Differential Diagnosis of the Etiologies of Bacterial and Viral Infections Using Infrared Microscopy of Peripheral Human Blood Samples and Multivariate Analysis”. The data demonstrate that the use of the Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy technique on peripheral blood samples yields a differential diagnosis when seeking to make a clinical diagnosis between patients with viral infections, bacterial infections and healthy controls.
“With the recent explosion of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) worldwide, definitively diagnosing viral infections versus bacterial or other types of infections that present with similar symptoms has become paramount in order to appropriately triage patients and guide treatment decisions for healthcare professionals,” said Gerald Commissiong, President & CEO of Todos Medical. “Todos’ proprietary FTIR blood testing platform that focuses on the immune system’s reaction to cancer has received CE Marks in Europe for the diagnosis of breast cancer and colon cancer, has recently achieved strong analytical performance results from our proprietary sample preparation methods, and is currently enrolling a pre-commercial breast cancer study in Romania with distribution partner Orot+ (a division of Orot Luces) ahead of an expected commercial launch in Romania later this year. Based on these recent successes and this publication from the Company’s licensors at Ben Gurion University, we have now formally begun to evaluate the commercial feasibility of applying our technology towards the diagnosis of bacterial and viral infections, including coronavirus. Because we use AI to create the algorithms required to differentially diagnosis cancer, we believe the rate limiting step towards creating algorithms for viral and bacterial infections on our platform is access to sufficient viral and bacterial patient samples in order create those new algorithms. As such, we have begun outreach efforts to determine the potential of obtaining such samples from coronavirus-affected jurisdictions.”
ABSTRACT ( https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.8b00017 )
Human viral and bacterial infections are responsible for a variety of diseases that are still the main causes of death and economic burden for society across the globe. Despite the different responses of the immune system to these infections, some of them have similar symptoms, such as fever, sneezing, inflammation, vomiting, diarrhea, and fatigue. Thus, physicians usually encounter difficulties in distinguishing between viral and bacterial infections on the basis of these symptoms. Rapid identification of the etiology of infection is highly important for effective treatment and can save lives in some cases. The current methods used for the identification of the nature of the infection are mainly based on growing the infective agent in culture, which is a time-consuming (over 24 h) and usually expensive process. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of the mid-infrared spectroscopic method for rapid and reliable identification of bacterial and viral infections based on simple peripheral blood samples. For this purpose, white blood cells (WBCs) and plasma were isolated from the peripheral blood samples of patients with confirmed viral or bacterial infections. The obtained spectra were analyzed by multivariate analysis: principle component analysis (PCA) followed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA), to identify the infectious agent type as bacterial or viral in a time span of about 1 h after the collection of the blood sample. Our preliminary results showed that it is possible to determine the infectious agent with high success rates of 82% for sensitivity and 80% for specificity, based on the WBC data.
