Startup Aims To Diagnose Brain Disease In Minutes Rather Than Days

The idea was one Dr. Alex Lin had for 10 years — a faster way to look at the chemistry inside a patient’s brain in an entirely non-invasive way.

Thanks to the Innovation Hub, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital startup accelerator program that gave a $10,000 grant and other help to help develop Lin’s idea, a new company aiming to do exactly that is now launching clinical trials and looking for seed funding.

“Without a doubt, if (the Brigham) hadn’t had this opportunity, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Lin, a director of the Center for Clinical Spectroscopy at Brigham and Women’s and professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.

The company, called BrainSpec, is built off a technology called MR Spectroscopy. It uses an MRI to measure different chemicals in the brain. While MRIs have been used for years to do this sort of virtual biopsy, the outputs are exceedingly difficult to read and must be read using the machine, which costs $500 an hour. Spectroscopy personnel are so overwhelmed with demand that it now takes two to three days to analyze a patient.

With the help of physicist and programmer Ben Rowland and Harvard Business School student Alex Zimmerman, Lin developed software that can do the analysis, giving physicians an easy-to-understand readout.

“This software will allow us to take (processing a patient) from three days to three minutes,” Lin said. “That’s the reason we felt this was something we needed to develop. We have a backlog of patients.”

BrainSpec has developed a prototype and is integrating the software for studying brain tumors in several beta sites, including Brigham and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Though the group won’t need Food and Drug Administration approval to conduct clinical trials, the company will eventually seek FDA approval to sell the software. The company is looking to raise between $1 million to $1.5 million in seed funding to cover costs of FDA approval process.

“We hope by September we’ll have a product we can start selling,” Lin said.

Though the initial product is focused on brain cancer, Lin has larger ideas for BrainSpec — namely, Alzheimer’s disease. Studies are also being developed with Boston University to develop a diagnostic test for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain condition that has strong ties to repeated concussions.

Beyond patient diagnostics, Lin hopes the data collected by this software will eventually help researchers understand the chemical fingerprints to other diseases.

“It’s a cloud-based service, so we will have a lot of data generated that we think can be used for data mining,” Lin said.

Source: Boston Business Journal, Jessica Bartlett
Photo: (From left) Physicist and programmer Ben Rowland, Harvard Business School student Alex Zimmerman, and Dr. Alex Lin, director of the Center for Clinical Spectroscopy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, developed BrainSpec. (Courtesy/Dr. Alex Lin)

Jessica Bartlett covers health care, including hospitals, health IT, health policy and insurance, as well as the beer industry.