GlycoPath’s proprietary GlycoTyper™ immunoaffinity technology was used to distinguish between Lyme disease infection states and track treatment response through a collaboration with Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Mary Ann Comunale identified glycosylation changes that differentiate acute Lyme disease and track with treatment and partnered with GlycoPath to confirm her labs findings. The study, published in the Frontiers of Immunology peer-reviewed journal by Benjamin Haslund-Gourley, et. al. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9389449/), reveals a new research avenue of immune dysregulation associated with the disease that is expected to contribute to the accurate and prompt treatment of Lyme disease patients.
Lyme Disease is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in the United States, with an estimated 476,000 annual cases. Current diagnostics for this disease and complicated and rely on indirect methods that suffer from low sensitivity and high false-positive rates. Furthermore, they are unable to distinguish between newly infected patients and patients that have received prior treatment. This makes it impossible to determine treatment efficacy, track disease resolution or diagnose subsequent infections. By utilizing the GlycoTyper™ methodology on a small cohort of patients, researchers were able to distinguish between control, acute and treated patients with a specificity of 94.7-100%.
Prior to this study, the proprietary GlycoTyper™ methodology had only been applied to liver diseases. Earlier this year, results from the first GlycoFibroTyper™ study were published, showing that the GlycoFibroTyper™ assay was able to detect liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, the pre-malignant pre-cursor to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), with a higher sensitivity and specificity and overall accuracy than current standard of care. Furthermore, this assay is significantly less invasive, suitable for continuous monitoring, and provides a measurement of the overall health status of the liver. Learn more about the GlycoFibroTyper™ here: https://glycopath.com/glycotyper. Additionally, in March, GlycoPath received STTR grant funding from the National Cancer Institute to utilize this technology for the development of a biomarker panel for HCC, a major cancer in the USA and rest of the world.