By Ruthie Edelstein, NoCamels -
There’s a common situation that occurs during a doctor’s visit. The patient comes in with an ailment, perhaps it’s a cough, a congested chest or ear ache. The doctor raises possibilities of what could be causing the sickness – pneumonia, strep throat, an ear infection and so on. Chests are listened to, ears are examined, noses are swabbed and some tests are sent off to the lab.
In the meantime, as the results may take days to come in, the doctor recommends that the patient get started on a round of antibiotics, making an educated guess to diagnose a possible bacterial infection and hoping to tackle it before it gets worse.
The doctor makes the best recommendation with the knowledge available at that moment.
Unfortunately, inefficient testing has led to the over-prescription of antibiotics, resulting in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which is when bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 1.27 million deaths every year that are directly attributed to antimicrobial resistance, with the prediction that by 2050, AMR will be the cause of 10 million annual deaths worldwide.
To tackle this issue, Israeli medical technology startup NanoSynex has developed a rapid personalized diagnostic test, which will enable doctors to prescribe the correct antibiotics at the moment they are needed most.
“There is a clear issue of misuse and overuse of antibiotics, and one of the ways to address this crisis, other than developing new antibiotics, is to better use existing antibiotics, by boosting the development of rapid and reliable diagnostic solutions, which is what we are doing at NanoSynex,” Diane Abensur, CEO and co-founder of NanoSynex, tells NoCamels.
NanoSynex offers laboratories better and faster solutions to determine the best treatment plan by providing rapid and accurate results for Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST), tests that are used to determine which specific antibiotics a particular bacteria or fungus is sensitive to.
By prescribing the most appropriate antibiotic treatment to patients in order to treat them earlier, and also to prevent antimicrobial resistance from spreading in the environment, they are working to prevent the growth of the superbug crisis that is threatening the world today.
“Our company is developing a revolutionary solution for providing fast and accurate results,” Abensur explains.
The company, which is located in Ness Ziona’s Weizmann Science Park, has designed a disposable test card that is pre-loaded with a large panel of antibiotics at a variety of concentrations.
A sample containing the bacteria causing the ailment is taken from the patient and injected into the almost 2,000 nanowells of the test card and then incubated in a benchtop reader that NanoSynex has developed. Once they are incubated in the reader, the bacteria present in the patient’s sample metabolize and grow, emitting a fluorescent signal.
NanoSynex uses a specific fluorescent marker that correlates the intensity of a fluorescent signal to the amount of bacterial growth. Its proprietary software then captures images of the test cards and issues a list of antibiotics that are appropriate for the patient, as well as the minimum concentration of each antibiotic that would be needed to kill the bacteria.
NanoSynex’s core technology was developed by Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, who at the time of development was serving as Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
Now the Chief Scientific Advisor of NanoSynex, Levenberg performed a scientific transfer of the technology to NanoSynex in 2018, and the company was founded that year by Abensur and NanoSynex COO Michelle Heymann.
Since its founding, NanoSynex has raised almost $11 million, having received funding from sources all around the world, including from angel investors, grants, the Israel Innovation Authority and the European Innovation Council.
NanoSynex has had to become especially resilient following the mass terror attack of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent – and still ongoing – war with Hamas, the terror group that perpetrated it.
The company has continued to operate while dealing with the shock and trauma of the war and losses as well as the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that have impacted their ability to reach their office.
The company has cross-trained employees in critical roles to mitigate the impact of sudden call ups for Israel Defense Forces reserve duty, and departures abroad, to ensure essential tasks can still be carried out.
In spite of these obstacles, NanoSynex now possesses what is called a minimum viable product, and the next step for their team is to now demonstrate their product in a clinical setting.
While there are other testing technologies available, NanoSynex says its two major advantages lay in their product’s ability to help doctors determine in a rapid and automated way both the correct antibiotic as well as the minimum concentration required of that antibiotic to inhibit growth of the bacteria.
“Our goal is to reduce mortality and morbidity rates by fighting superbugs with rapid and precise diagnostics testing and avoid going back to the pre-antibiotic era, since developing new antibiotics takes too long and bacteria develops resistance to new antibiotics at a much faster rate than the new antibiotic can be developed,” Heymann explains.
The ability to test up to 20 patients at once and the quantity of antibiotics that they can test for at an affordable cost sets NanoSynex apart from the many startups that are focused on more expensive niche testing.
When it comes to the companies that have offered testing for years and continue to dominate the market, NanoSynex explains that it is their ability to process large amounts of information in a short amount of time that gives their product a great advantage.
The team is eager to participate in clinical studies in microbiology departments of hospitals which will ultimately bring them closer to their goal of saving lives by fighting and preventing antibiotic resistant bacteria.
