SBIR Phase I: A Blood Test to Detect Cerebral Aneurysms

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目预计将推进脑动脉瘤（CA）的诊断和治疗。CA影响2-5%的人口。每年有近30，000名美国人在没有警告的情况下遭受CA破裂，导致约50%的死亡率。CA大部分是无症状的，因此通常在破裂前未被发现。通过提供第一个能够检测和评估CA的血液测试，该项目将能够以今天不可能的频率进行监测。该技术还将提供动态破裂风险评分，可整合到患者护理程序中，以更好地指导术前、侵入性诊断和手术干预。这项技术降低了测试成本，将促进更定期的监测和早期行动，使少数民族和其他社会经济地位较低的群体受益，他们难以获得预防性医疗保健。最终，该项目有可能改善未破裂CA患者的预后和生活质量，降低医疗成本，以及对CA发病机制的新见解。这项技术将为高危人群及其家人带来安心。这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目旨在推进第一个简单的基于全血的诊断测试，以检测脑动脉瘤（CA）的存在并监测其进展。 该项目将开发动态破裂风险评分以及新的动脉瘤亚组。目前，CA只能通过脑成像诊断，如磁共振成像或计算机断层扫描血管造影。这些方法不适合定期筛查，因为成本高得令人望而却步，而且存在潜在风险。该项目将利用动脉瘤是动态的，并随着时间的推移表现出不同的细胞因子特征的事实。通过精心选择的细胞因子和专有模型，这些炎症特征可以在患有未破裂和破裂动脉瘤的CA患者中可靠地区分。该项目将生成一个强大的CA患者血液样本数据集，重点是增加来自服务不足人群的样本代表性。 该数据集将用于训练专有概率方程，以开发破裂风险度量。将使用基于机器学习的主成分分析对数据进行分层，以创建具有关键感兴趣细胞因子的不同动脉瘤亚组。该分析将为针对这些患者的特定炎症驱动因素的精确医学分子治疗打开大门。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is expected to advance the diagnosis and treatment of cerebral aneurysm (CA). CAs affect 2-5% of the population. Nearly 30,000 Americans each year suffer CA rupture without warning, resulting in approximately 50% mortality. CAs are largely asymptomatic, and therefore usually undetected until ruptured. By providing the first blood test able to detect and evaluate CAs, this project will enable monitoring at frequencies not possible today. The technology will also offer a dynamic rupture risk score that can be integrated into the patient care routine to better guide preoperative, invasive diagnosis and surgical interventions. Decreased testing costs enabled by this technology will promote more regular monitoring and early action, benefiting minorities and other groups with lower socioeconomic status who struggle to access preventative healthcare. Ultimately, this project has the potential to lead to improved patient outcomes and better quality of life for patients living with unruptured CAs and reductions in healthcare costs, as well as new insights into CA pathogenesis. The technology will bring peace of mind to those in high-risk groups and their families.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to advance the first simple, whole blood-based diagnostic test to detect the presence and monitor the progression of a cerebral aneurysm (CA). The project will develop a dynamic rupture risk score as well as novel aneurysm subgroupings. Currently, CAs can only be diagnosed with cerebral imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography angiography. These approaches are not suited for regular screening due to prohibitively high costs and potential risks. This project will exploit the fact that aneurysms are dynamic and exhibit different cytokine signatures over time. With a carefully selected panel of cytokines and a proprietary model, these inflammatory signatures can be reliably differentiated in CA patients with unruptured and ruptured aneurysms. This project will generate a robust dataset of CA patient blood samples, with a focus on increasing sample representation from underserved populations. The dataset will be used to train a proprietary probabilistic equation to develop a risk of rupture metric. Data will be stratified using machine learning-based principal component analysis to create distinct aneurysm subgroups with key cytokines of interest. This analysis will open the door for precision-medicine molecular therapy against specific drivers of inflammation in those patients.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.