NanoPin Technologies Announces a Research Collaboration Agreement to Advance a Rapid Blood-based Test for Tuberculosis and Infectious Diseases

NanoPin Technologies, Inc., whose mission is to develop advanced diagnostics to improve the lives of millions of individuals affected by infectious disease, announces the formation of a collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific to refine the liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LCMS)-based workflow to allow robust and highly sensitive clinical application of NanoPin’s proprietary diagnostic technology.

Diagnostic advances play critical roles in controlling infectious disease outbreaks, supporting prevention efforts, and improving patient treatment outcomes. Rapidly detecting whether or not an individual has an infectious disease, determining the severity of a diagnosed infection, and evaluating an individual’s response to treatment can greatly improve the ability of health care providers to provide appropriate and personalized care. This would be highly valuable in the global effort to combat tuberculosis (TB), which is now the leading cause of death from infectious disease, with an estimated 10 million new TB cases and 1.5 million TB-associated deaths annually (WHO 2019 Annual Report). Current TB diagnostics on the market have difficulty distinguishing latent (i.e. asymptomatic and nonprogressive) TB infections from active TB disease and detecting active TB across the full spectrum of affected patient groups. Unlike currently available methods, however, NanoPin’s TB test demonstrates robust diagnostic performance for pulmonary and extrapulmonary, HIV co-infected, and pediatric TB cases.

NanoPin’s diagnostic technology derives from the research performed by Professor Tony Hu, Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Biotechnology Innovation at the Tulane University School of Medicine and a NanoPin founder. His research was driven by the imperative to help those afflicted by TB, particularly the more than 1 million children who develop TB every year, almost a quarter of whom die of TB-associated causes. Professor Hu has stated that “Current technologies for TB testing were just not sufficient to combat the TB epidemic. Coughed-up sputum and invasive biopsies that do not work well in critical patient cohorts and blood culture tests which take weeks to get results are limiting factors and can give many false negatives”. NanoPin is bringing to market a diagnostic platform that sensitively detects TB antigen levels present in patient blood samples in a matter of hours. This technology has several key advantages over currently available approaches, since it does not require sputum or invasive tissue biopsies for TB diagnosis, and will ultimately provide quantitative results for rapid evaluation of treatment response. Dr. Thomas Tombler, chief executive officer of NanoPin Technologies, stated that “The current diagnostic solutions available for the detection and monitoring of infectious disease are not sufficient, limiting patient outcomes and the global management of such ailments. Through our agreement with Thermo Fisher, our unique diagnostic platform has the potential to change how infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, are detected, treated, and controlled by solving the unmet needs of healthcare providers managing patient care throughout the world.”

“Time is of the essence when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from infectious disease, and current methods do not facilitate prompt diagnosis and rapid evaluation of treatment response,” said Bradley Hart, senior director, clinical research, chromatography and mass spectrometry, Thermo Fisher Scientific. “Through our collaboration with NanoPin Technologies and the development of novel LC-MS workflows, we will enable healthcare providers to advance patient outcomes through the improved diagnosis, monitoring and management of infectious disease.”

About NanoPin Technologies, Inc.
At NanoPin Technologies, our mission is to advance infectious disease detection and improve patient care using a novel diagnostic platform that produces rapid and quantified results from patient blood samples. This versatile platform addresses critical needs for current infectious disease epidemics, including the ongoing tuberculosis and HIV epidemics, and can be adapted to diagnose pathogens that cause future contagions.