Since joining BIU’s School of Engineering in 2014, Dr. Amos Danielli is exploring new medical applications for the novel technology he developed, which can help shorten diagnosis time for heart patients.

Each year, over 10 million people visit emergency rooms in US hospitals with symptoms of chest pain. About 8-9% of these patients have actually suffered heart attacks, though most of them cannot be diagnosed with simple clinical evaluation and an electrocardiogram test. Typically an accurate diagnosis can take six to nine hours after the onset of symptoms — and longer if stress testing is required.

This protracted delay leads to substantial over-admission, delays in treatment for other patients, and consumption of health care resources. In fact, admission time accounts for almost 75% of the average cost per patient with symptoms suggestive of heart attack.

To improve current diagnostic capabilities, several companies have developed high sensitivity tests, but only one such assay has been commercialized, and none has been approved for clinical use in the US. Such high sensitivity tests performed in series with shorter time intervals could halve the time needed to evaluate patients, but even when they are available, they are carried out only in advanced laboratory settings, adding an additional step to the process that all but nullifies their benefits.

Dr. Danielli’s Solution

BIU’s Dr. Amos Danielli, principal investigator in the Trau Family Research Wing, has devised a novel technology, his US patented “Magnetic Modulation Biosensing,” that can help shorten diagnosis time for cardiac arrest patients.

Based on this, Dr. Danielli is now working to develop a high sensitivity, point-of-care device that can measure low concentrations of the protein troponin (an indicator of a heart attack) directly from whole blood samples. This device will reduce the time required to confirm or rule out a heart attack to within two to three hours, leading to improved care at lower cost for some 10 million people each year in the US and a reduction in ER congestion. Clinical adoption of the device could spur development for other medical applications that could benefit from point-of-care, high sensitivity biomarker detection, including detection of head injuries and viruses, etc.

“We are still in the pre-clinical stage and conducting trials at Washington University (in St Louis, Missouri),” relates Danielli, who was recruited to BIU from Tel Aviv U. “Today I am a faculty member at Bar-Ilan University, where I am developing the next generation of the technology in the bio-medical group of the engineering faculty.” Globes [online], Israel business news reports that the company which Danielli founded, MagBiosense, is in the midst of a funding round of $2.5-3 million after previously raising half a million dollars.