In the past, pharmaceutical companies profited from a one-size-fits-all blockbuster drug model. Those days are on the decline and companies are slowly coming around to the idea that, in order to be more effective and save money, drugs have to be more personalized.

"Some people respond to drugs and some people don't and [pharma companies] don't really understand why," Bill Colston, CEO of Healthtell, told Medical Device Daily.

His company uses an Immunosignature technology designed to assess an individual's immune system response to specific diseases. According to the company, the technology enables deeper patient profiling, helps companies assess the effectiveness of programs and reduces costs by ensuring effective drugs get to market faster.

Any disease that affects the immune response (cancer, infectious disease, autoimmune, metabolic and neurologic diseases) can potentially be measured using the Healthtell test and a single drop of blood. The basis for the platform is a high-density peptide array that is specially designed to query the myriad of antibodies present in a human blood sample. The fabrication of those arrays leverages equipment and processes similar to those used in the manufacturing of silicon-based electronics, making it both cost effective and scalable, according to Healthtell.

The technology is based on research conducted by Stephen Johnston and Neal Woodbury, co-directors of the Center for Innovations in Medicine at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

"Rather than measure the pathogen directly, we measures the body's unique response, its 'Immunosignature,' to a given disease or disease state," said Johnston. "By understanding what each Immunosignature means and how it changes over time, Healthtell can provide a broad menu of highly accurate tests that are capable of detecting diseases much earlier and less invasively than is possible today."

Colston said the ability to measure the body's immunological response to disease provides unique applications to the drug development industry. That measurement can be applied across various therapeutic areas, including oncology, immunology and infectious disease.

The technology has the potential to help improve therapies for complex autoimmune diseases such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, Colston said.

"It turns out our technology could have utility in almost every cycle of the drug discovery process," he said.

From patient profiling applications for the purposes of patient enrollment or stratification within clinical trials, to measuring disease progression and monitoring drug resistance, the technology covers multiple pieces of the drug discovery process.

When performed in parallel with DNA or RNA analysis, Immunosignature analysis can be used to retrospectively measure and provide additional insight from banked samples, Healthtell said, calling Immunosignature an accurate and sensitive measurement of a patient's current disease state. Besides drug development, the technology also has various applications, including target identification, monoclonal antibody screening and epitope binning.

Healthtell has already added pharmaceutical partnerships and Colston said by the end of the summer he expects to have contracts in place with several large pharmaceutical companies. "They don't move very fast, but we are starting to get some traction internally," he said.

The company is starting to see some revenue, Colston said, from its pharmaceutical collaborations as well as its research collaborations.

But convincing those large drugmakers of the technology's value hasn't been easy.

"I think the biggest challenge we've faced is, because it's a new technology, them understanding what it is we're measuring," Colston said. "When they see it, it takes them a while to understand the significance."

The company hasn't had too much trouble convincing investors of its value, however. Healthtell is backed by several venture capital firms, including Cambridge Global Capital, The Broe Group, Accadia Woods Partners, Vital Venture Capital and Paladin Capital Group. To date, the company has secured $13.5 million to support the development and commercialization if its technology. Colston said the company will start raising a series B funding round in the fall.

A number of global trends are driving the need for products like Healthtell's. Colston listed some of those drivers in a previous interview with MDD last year: a rapidly aging population correlated with increased incidence of cancer and other chronic diseases, skyrocketing health care expenditures and a huge new wave of consumer involvement in their personal wellness. (See Medical Device Daily, Nov. 25, 2014.)

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