Waiting for lab results can be frustrating or downright scary.
Sometimes, the process involves blood draws or other potentially painful procedures. For diseases like pancreatic cancer, which often evades diagnosis until its advanced stages, innovation in diagnostic technology isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. InnovaPrep’s lab at KU Innovation Park—nicknamed ACE, the Application Center of Excellence—is focused on just that. By using exosomes in urine and other body fluids, InnovaPrep hopes to make a diagnosis simpler and easier.
The foundation of InnovaPrep is its name—innovative preparation for laboratories. The company’s hardware provides an alternative to standard methods, such as centrifuges, for concentrating organisms and biological particles. “Our customers all have a math problem – their sample is too dilute,” said Dave Alburty, InnovaPrep’s CEO and principal investigator. “We can take a real-world sample, like a urine specimen or a water sample out of a lake or a can of beer, and concentrate that into a fraction of a drop so that the target material is there for them to analyze.”
Everything that InnovaPrep does must fit one criterion – make the world a better and safer place for people and animals. To that end, the company started with bio-defense contracts, helping the government and armed forces to analyze for threats. That led to consumer product analysis, such as looking for contamination in beer or wine or monitoring wastewater for COVID-19. The move toward exosomes and the clinical market makes the company’s work even more personalized. “Pancreatic cancer can’t be detected, usually, in most people until they’re symptomatic, and by then, they might be stage four,” Alburty said. “But if we could identify it at stage one, then maybe more could be done.”
Hear how InnovaPrep hopes to make medical diagnoses simpler and easier.
SMALL SAMPLES, BIG RESULTS
Just as Alburty and the InnovaPrep team were looking to enter the clinical space, a colleague was looking to sell. The company purchased the lab assets of Clara Biotech, a startup located at KU Innovation Park, because the team had identified the opportunity in exosomes to help fight cancer. Clara Biotech’s lab at the Park was a turnkey operation for Alburty. Plus, it provided a chance to dig into innovation away from InnvoaPrep’s busy engineering labs and manufacturing headquarters in Drexel, Mo. “When I come out here to work in the Park, it’s strictly about the focus on innovation and inventing our way into the clinical market, which is completely new for us,” Alburty said.
The facility at Drexel serves as the production site for the company’s microfluidic devices, representing the core of the concentration process. And everything in the world of rapid microbiology samples is getting smaller. InnovaPrep’s FluidPrep™ Concentrating Pipette System recovers microorganisms and particles – like fungal spores, viruses and bacteria, and even synthetic particles – from liquid samples between ten milliliters to five liters in volume. For scale, a shot of tequila might be 50 milliliters, equivalent to 50,000 microliters. The pipette system can generate a 250-microliter final sample, about five drops. One microliter would be about the size of the head of a pin. But it’s not always about going tiny.
“Not only does it scale down, which is interesting for personalized medicine and for clinical diagnostics, but it scales up as well,” Alburty said. “We also have these concentration cartridges that are the size of my arm. It can process over hundreds of liters of water and look for threats.”
InnovaPrep is focusing on exosomes, particularly those in urine, because they are easy to acquire from patients. Imagine taking a trip to the bathroom instead of a lab for a blood draw during your annual checkup. Using urine could be especially impactful for the smallest patients, like babies in the NICU, or people averse to needles. And Alburty imagines the future of diagnostics as not just reactive but proactive. “You could potentially not just go after the disease state,” he said. “Maybe you want to document that you’re healthy, set a basis and monitor that and help spot something early.”
PERKS OF THE PARK
As a Jayhawk, Alburty had his eye on KU Innovation Park. He said when he learned about what was happening on West Campus, he was amazed. He says the Park provides wet lab space that gives him the time and space to innovate in a secure location, away from the hustle and bustle of the Drexel facility. “It’s kind of a secret skunkworks laboratory out here,” Alburty said.
But to Alburty, it’s the collaboration that makes the Park special. “The companies here and the people who are working here are interactive with each other, curious about what each other are doing,” he said. “To find more collaborators is priceless. You just don’t get that anywhere.”
