The wait time for diagnosing infectious diseases is likely not even a point of consideration to the average healthy Canadian. But most people would agree that a device that allowed doctors to make more informed patient management decisions, improve antibiotic stewardship, shorten patient waiting times for treatment, shorten hospital stays, reduce unnecessary medical procedures and save critical health care dollars would be beneficial to the global health-care system.

Dr. James Mahony and his team at Advanced Theranostics are currently refining a device that will help achieve these results.

Advanced Theranostics develops therapeutic peptides to treat bacterial and viral infections. Synthetic peptides have two major disadvantages; ie. they are expensive to synthesize and they are broken down quickly in the body. The solution is to attach these peptides to a human scaffold protein such as albumin, which is abundant in human serum, and to make these peptides as fusion proteins using recombinant DNA technology. The fusion proteins will last longer in the body, they will not be broken down as quickly as small peptides, and they can be expressed and purified as recombinant proteins in bacteria.