By: Christopher Rogers
INNOVATOR
Detecting innovation: Verisante and the path to its ingenious cancer diagnostic tool
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In case you haven’t heard, Verisante Technology, Inc., is a BC-based life science company that has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with the BC Cancer Agency for rights to a non-invasive tool that allows for the detection of skin cancer in two seconds. It’s also easy enough for a physician’s assistant or a nurse to use to quickly and efficiently scan every mole on a patient’s body and then, have a doctor review the results to make better biopsy decisions.
18 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS FEBRUARY 2011
Dr. Haishan Zeng
The tool, known as the Verisante Aura™ uses a multimodality imaging and spectroscopy system originally invented at the BC Cancer Agency. Dr. Haishan Zeng, PhD, one of the coinventors, is a senior scientist at the BC Cancer Agency’s Research Centre and associate professor of dermatology and skin science at the University of British Columbia. He said that the device has been in development for approximately 10 years. “We targeted a powerful analytical method called Raman spectroscopy,” he said. “Raman spectroscopy uses a laser to probe molecular vibrations and gives very specific, fingerprint-like spectral patterns for tissue biochemical composition identification.” However, the technology was not ready to be leveraged on a commercially viable scale; it wasn’t practical for clinical applications. The team had to make a number of breakthroughs to make it practical, and they did. Zeng said they sped up the data acquisition time from minutes to seconds, developed a compact Raman probe for non-invasive measurement and created a real-time data processing algorithm.
The technology works by measuring biochemical changes in tissues and cells using inelastic light scattering. “Near-infrared laser light is used to illuminate the skin. Proprietary optics and sensitive light detectors are employed to analyze the back-scattered light. The light scattering patterns are determined by the biochemical compositions,” Zeng said. This allows for the measurements to be taken in a non-invasive way and the results are displayed on a monitor in real-time. Zeng said that the technology uses an algorithm to analyze the acquired biochemical information instantaneously and indicate to the physician the probability that a lesion is likely to be cancer. “The probability number is based on the acquired biochemical information, which when combined with a physician’s clinical experiences, improves diagnosis.” In 2006, Thomas Braun, founded Verisante Technology, Inc. (then T-Ray Science, Inc.) to collaborate with the University of Waterloo on a cancer imaging technology, similar to what the company eventually settled into with the BC Cancer Agency. When the company began, it was a collaboration between only three people: Braun, an accountant, and a medical device engineer. Braun, who was previously a business lawyer specialized in representing small high-tech companies, corporate finance transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and technology licensing agreements. He felt that starting his own medical device company was a natural evolution for his career. Braun and his colleagues began by raising money from friends and family and then moved on to accredited investors and business associates. “It’s not easy to start a company - it’s hard and there are plenty of challenges to overcome but we’ve been finding that when people find out about this technology they realize that it’s something they can relate to because of their personal experience; we’re very excited about it,” he said. In late 2009 the company went public, and shortly after, in March 2010, began negotiating their current licensing agreement with the BC Cancer Agency. Braun, CEO of Verisante Technology, Inc., felt that the imaging technology available to be licensed by the BC Cancer Agency, was more advanced than Verisante’s because it was backed by a six year clinical study of approximately 1,000 lesions conducted at the Skin Care Centre at the Vancouver General Hospital. The principal investigator of the study was Dr. Harvey Lui, head of the Department of Dermatology and Skin Science at the University of British Columbia and one of the leading skin cancer experts in the world. The
