Deton

Summary: Every year, >20M patients in the US suffer from lung disease including infections like Pneumonia, chronic conditions like COPD, and lung cancer. Lung disease is the #1 killer in both infectious disease and cancer.  Deton is pioneering its “Aerosol Biopsy” proprietary solutions for the non-invasive, reliable and cost-effective diagnosis of lung disease. Our platform technology, the Cough Collector, captures and isolates biological samples that originate from the lung and are expelled as an aerosol through cough. Today, because of the lack of non-invasive reliable samples, lung diseases are either treated without knowledge of the root cause or are identified and treated late in the progression of the disease. Deton’s Aerosol Biopsy offers the hope of improving patient outcomes and saving costs by enabling early and targeted therapies. We have recruited >100 subjects: 75 CF patients with P. aeruginosa infections and 26 healthy subjects. The Cough Collector results showed high sensitivity (>90%) and specificity (>99%). Additionally, the CF patient with infections also showed a heightened level of human genomic DNA compared to the healthy controls. These results have generated excitement amongst the oncologists at UCLA, Yale, City of Hope, and UCSD where we are laying the groundwork to launch pilot studies to obtain data in lung cancer patients during the Seed round.

Need: Lung disease is the #1 killer in both infectious disease and cancer. Access to diagnostic technologies is severely limited by the lack of non-invasive and reliable samples in patients with lung disease. Today, we have non-invasive poor quality samples (sputum, imaging) or highly-invasive quality samples (bronchoscopy, traditional biopsy). This forces doctors to treat based on empiric evidence (infections) or treat only when the disease has advanced (cancer). In both cases, patient outcomes suffer and costs go up. There is a need for a non-invasive quality diagnostic test to identify disease, inform treatment decisions, and improve patient outcomes.

Value: Deton’s Aerosol Biopsy solutions can diagnose lung disease non-invasively and with high accuracy. In infectious disease, our solution allows doctors to make informed treatment decisions which helps reduce cost and improve patient outcomes. In lung cancer, our solution provides doctors with a test that is more specific than imaging and that can reduce the amount of unnecessary invasive biopsies and the related risks and costs. We intend to disrupt the treatment of cancer by making therapies available to more patients before the cancer has metastasized, when lives can be saved and not only nominally prolonged.