Resonant Sensors cancer detection system closer to market

When Resonant Sensors began moving its optical detection technology onto the marketplace in late 2007, CEO and chief scientist Debra Wawro knew she had a platform technology on her hands that could be used in various fields.

With two recent grants, her system to detect substances by looking at reflected light is being adapted to help health care professionals who work in the clinic and on research focused on cancer.

“It’s always good to think you’re doing something that will help with the good of humanity, rather than just for fun,” Wawro said.

Resonant Sensors Inc. was founded in 2004 and based on more than a decade of research by Wawro, whose background is in engineering. The company gained momentum through various grants, and this July was awarded a little more than $200,000 from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. The total grant submission was for $300,000, and so more funding is expected in the future, but the NCI grant was done in collaboration with Peter Koulen, who teaches and researches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, where he is the director of basic research at the Vision Research Center.

Resonant Sensors also recently received a $400,000 small business grant from the National Science Foundation, Wawro said. Both of the grants will be put toward next-generation research and development of products.

The technology is based on detecting a substance — like cancer — by looking at the way light is reflected off the substance. Multiple points are measured with this technology, something that current optical detection systems don’t offer, Wawro said, and this cuts down on false positives, something that is a real concern for patients and physicians, since no one wants to undergo unnecessary medical treatment.

Because the detection is based on light being reflected and not chemical reactions, change happens in real time as colors shift, depending on density changes on the device’s surface. This cuts down on time spent processing samples, and results could be seen in about 15 minutes or so, Wawro said.

“We basically just track color change; we just use fancy methods to do it,” she said, because some of the things detected can be even smaller than the wavelengths used to detect them.

Cutting down on test result times could have a real benefit for patients who are waiting to hear whether they have cancer, said Dr. Amelia Gunter, a general surgeon who practices in Fort Worth and Weatherford and focuses on breast surgery. She often deals with breast cancer patients, and biopsies typically have to be sent off to a pathologist to be processed and examined. Gunter said she typically gets results back in three to four days, which can be a long wait for some.

“I deal almost strictly with breast cancer, and it is a highly emotional time for them,” Gunter said. “It’s very stressful for them, and the more quickly we can get the results back to them, the better.”

The technology Resonant Sensors is working on would give real-time results in a doctor’s office or in an operating room, and Wawro said it would be simple enough that a non-specialist could run the tests. Having a physician, nurse or other health care provider do the testing on this portable device would be a huge asset, she said.

Gunter said currently the only way a physician can get rapid results is if a cytopathologist, who studies cells in disease, can look immediately at cells from a biopsy while in the room the biopsy is taken, but that is a rare situation. However, physicians often are able to give patients an estimate of how suspicious a lesion or lump or other possible cancerous site may be, just to prepare them for what could come back from a pathologist.

Right now, Resonant Sensors is working with customers — which include pharmaceutical companies, research companies, medical schools and universities, Wawro said — to validate applications as they’re asked. Customers wanted a tried-and-true optical cancer detection system, and so Resonant Sensors set out to develop it with chemistries that are on the market right now, so users don’t need to buy special supplies for everyday use through the company.

While a matter of days for testing may not seem like much time, it makes a huge difference to patients, Wawro said. Occasionally there are cases in which even a few extra days of treatment can make a difference, she said, and her biomedical technology can provide some help.

“When you’re screening for disease, you want to get results fast because you don’t want the person who’s being screened for a disease to wait for a week to find out they had a disease that could have been treated for a week,” she said.