DxDiscovery is a small business spinoff company located on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. We are academic in our origins and entrepreneurial in our culture. Research and development is funded by highly competitive grants from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense. Initially, DxDiscovery licenses technologies to partner companies who manufacture and distribute diagnostics. A long-term objective is in-house production of those products best suited for manufacture at the DxDiscovery site.
Our goal is to reduce the burden of disease in both developed and resource limited countries. Although the specific needs are very different in these two environments, many requirements for diagnostics are quite similar. Diagnostics should be affordable, give rapid results, and be usable at the point of patient care or need.
DxDiscovery will produce diagnostics that will be disruptive for improvement of patient care. Current diagnostics are reactive to patient symptoms. DxDiscovery will produce diagnostics that can be used early in the course of disease or for proactive screening before the onset of symptoms. Early diagnosis leads to more effective treatment.
Our approach is detection of biomarkers for disease – molecules that are produced by microbes, tumors or other conditions that are unique to the disease or condition. Familiar examples include the PSA test for prostate cancer, the “quick Strep” test for strep throat, or the home pregnancy test. The test platform is the immunoassay – use of antibodies to detect biomarkers.
We focus on diseases where alternative means for diagnosis such as culture or use of molecular probes is ineffective or not practical. In some cases, the biomarker is known and the challenge is production of antibodies that are used to detect the biomarker. In other cases, the biomarker is not known; in this instance, the process begins with target discovery.
Core technologies used in diagnostics discovery and development include molecular immunology, immunochemistry, monoclonal antibody production, and a target discovery strategy termed In vivo microbial antigen discovery (InMAD).