By Beth Miller
Three-time entrepreneur Amos Danielli, PhD, has been chosen as a member of the 2014 Class of Entrepreneurial Fellows by Pipeline.
Danielli, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, is one of 13 entrepreneurs from Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska in a wide variety of fields that make up the class.
Kansas City-based Pipeline is a community of Midwest entrepreneurs designed to business high-growth companies, empower entrepreneurs and build the region’s economy. Participants attend four three-day modules a year. Washington University has been well represented in Pipeline for the past several years: Matthew MacEwen, an MD/PhD student, and Abigail Cohen, who graduated in 2013 with a degree in biomedical engineering and is a co-founder of Sparo Labs, were 2012 and 2013 Pipeline Fellows, respectively.
It’s latest of a string of successes for Danielli. In 2013, his company, then called MMBiosensing LLC, won the Olin Cup through the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurship at Washington University as well as an Arch Grant, a $50,000 unrestricted award to local startups. Recently, MagBiosense LLC, as it is now known, won a $100,000 grant from the Missouri Technology Corp. and is attracting funds from angel investors as well.
MagBiosense is working to speed diagnosis of heart attacks. Chest pain is the most common reason people visit the emergency room in developed countries and accounts for more than 6 million ER visits each year in the United States alone. But most heart attacks cannot be diagnosed solely with an electrocardiogram (EKG). A blood test to determine the level of the protein troponin I can give a definitive diagnosis of a heart attack, but it can take six to nine hours to complete. Danielli and MagBiosense have developed a diagnostic tool to reduce that time to two to three hours.
“We can detect subtle elevations in troponin I early on, so we don’t need to wait for the troponin level in the blood to rise high enough for the diagnostic device to detect it,” Danielli says.
Danielli invented the technology at Tel Aviv University as part of his graduate studies. In 2011, Danielli met Jack Ladenson, PhD, the Oree M. Carroll and Lillian B. Ladenson Professor of Clinical Chemistry in Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine, who developed the first and still most widely used assays for troponin I. The monoclonal antibodies that he developed were licensed to a number of companies and became the standard of care applied in hospitals throughout the developed world.
With Ladenson’s help, Danielli sought funding to commercialize the technology. Danielli worked with the Skandalaris Center and recruited a team of students in the Hatchery to write a business plan. To perform market research, he then recruited the Biotechnology and Life Science Advising (BALSA) Group, a team of students and postdoctoral researchers in biomedical engineering who provide consulting services.
“These two groups – the Hatchery and BALSA Group – provided me with a lot of material that I could use to go on to business plan competitions later with success,” Danielli says.
“It’s very exciting to create something new and to be revolutionary to meet challenges,” he says. “With startups, you create something and end up selling it and being successful. The reward is incorporated into the excitement of the creation, and being creative is something that I have found very attractive.”
Danielli has accepted a faculty position at Bar Ilan University in Israel starting this summer. MagBiosense will maintain its headquarters in St. Louis, which will be the site of clinical trials. Danielli will continue to develop the technology in Israel.
“I learned that St. Louis is a great place to be for entrepreneurs,” Danielli says. “St. Louis is the headquarters of Monsanto, Sigma-Aldrich and several pharmaceutical companies. It has the largest hospital in Missouri and one of the top medical schools in the U.S. These resources, in addition to the availability of funds, make St. Louis very attractive to entrepreneurs, particularly in the life-science segment.”
Tom Cohen, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Medicine, also was selected for the class. Cohen is CEO of Nanopore Diagnostics, a startup working to fight the spread of resistance by preventing the misuse of antibiotics. Nanopore Diagnostics was the winner of the 2014 Olin Cup.
The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 82 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 700 graduate students and more than 23,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.