Veravas Improves Diagnostic Tests by Purifying Samples
Long-time health tech founder John Forrest has teamed up with diagnostics expert Joshua Soldo on a diagnostics platform that could make all medical tests more reliable and accurate. It has applications across healthcare, but the team is initially using their biomarker-purifying technology to design a more accurate test for Alzheimer's disease.
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Origin Story
Every day people face the heartbreak of a misdiagnosis, delaying treatments that could save their life. What if we could ensure every diagnostic test result was right the first time?
Some inventions are the result of a eureka moment in the lab, others are sparked out of deep necessity. And some companies are born out of a deep curiosity and internal drive to build a future that’s better than the past. Some are a combination of all three.
Meet John Forrest, the CEO & Co-founder of Veravas. Before launching this company, he was a serial health tech founder and operator. In fact, he’s been in the industry so long he can remember working on electronic health records on the DOS operating system. Over the years he brought to market a patient engagement app and a robot that mixed chemotherapy drugs right in the pharmacy, among other products.
Forrest is a builder, and the main throughline on this 30-year career, besides working in high-impact areas of health, has been working at the bleeding edge of technology.
After the chemotherapy robot was sold to McKesson, Forrest looked around and said, “what’s next?” He had a general sense that he wanted to innovate in the diagnostics market because blood tests and new biomarkers were an incredibly rich source of data, and the industry was in need of some upgrades. He began to dig and ask questions. As was his practice, he reached out to the smartest person he could find in the diagnostics industry and presented some of his early ideas. Their response: You need to talk to Joshua Soldo.
“If you’re going to change healthcare you gotta find the best person in the world. I found that person for diagnostics, and it’s Josh,” says Forrest.
Soldo had worked in diagnostic assays for more than 25 years, first in R&D and then as an award-winning medical affairs educator at Roche. Along the way he’d filed some novel patents around his work. It was that IP that caught Forrest’s attention.
"My motivation comes from the ability to leverage diagnostics to make a large-scale impact on healthcare," says Soldo. "Bringing a test to market means the chance to improve outcomes for millions of patients."
The two had a phone call and began to unpack the market potential for Soldo’s discoveries, which centered around a new way of purifying samples used in diagnostic tests. They quickly hit it off and one call turned into many, then turned into a fateful lunch that sealed them as partners in a new startup. John raised a quick $1M round and they were off and running.
Under the Hood
There are two elements to the Veravas technology. The first is the underlying “platform” that was born directly out of Soldo’s work. This is being commercialized under the name VeraBIND. It uses magnetic nano beads that can remove substances in blood samples that can interfere with test results. A good example is biotin, which can come from supplements and can cause inaccurate test results.
Veravas’s beads work like tiny assassins – Soldo calls them ‘ninja nano beads’ – targeting and removing these interfering substances without damaging the sample.
“What you're left with is a clean, interference-free sample which enables the assay to consistently generate accurate results,” says Soldo.
Soldo and his team validated their technology with the Mayo Clinic and demonstrated that VeraBIND effectively removed biotin interference from blood samples, and since that time have built a suite of interference-removing capabilities leading to more accurate test results.
Launching in Alzheimer’s Disease
There are a myriad potential applications for VeraBIND, which can both improve the accuracy of existing diagnostic tests and make new diseases detectable by enhancing hard-to-read biomarkers. But early on, the Veravas team decided to go beyond acting as a support platform for the diagnostic industry. They decided to use their tech to develop their own novel test.
The team looked around and decided the highest impact area for diagnostic innovation was in Alzheimer’s Disease. The need for a better Alzheimer’s test was massive, and it was a cause that touched everyone on the team personally. Once again, they reached out to the smartest people they could find, this time ending up in an all-day brainstorm session with famed Alzheimer's researcher Dr. Khalid Iqbal. Out of this collaboration was born an innovative approach to detecting Alzheimer’s – measuring active tau pathology in the blood. Here’s Soldo giving a simplified explanation:
“We're not asking the question how much of a biomarker is in the blood, we’re asking if that biomarker is pathologically active. We can use our technology to specifically capture and purify this biomarker, get it out of the blood and then characterize its binding interaction. That results in a test with a single cut point that says yes, you have the disease, or no, you don’t.”
That binary result stands in contrast to current Alzheimer's blood tests, which offer results in a range that includes a wide gray area. Results in the gray area often mean patients undergo expensive PET scans and invasive lumbar punctures.
"We're thrilled with how we've advanced and optimized this technology to address today's needs in the Alzheimer's disease space," says Forrest.
Final Word
The world of Alzheimer’s diagnostics is heating up. Veravas is an exciting new addition to that conversation and has the potential to shake things up in a good way.
One reason we’re bullish on this company is that their team has the right experience for the job. John Forrest has already successfully navigated the FDA and worked through a successful exit. Soldo spent years developing the IP on which the company’s products are based. As important as their Alzheimer’s diagnostic test is, perhaps what is most exciting is Veravas’ future beyond neurodegenerative diseases.
“Alzheimer's is how we're using our platform today,” says Soldo, “but we're not limited by any means to applying this technology in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. We could apply it to a range of fields, from cancer to saliva diagnostics.”
Forrest, Soldo, and team are on a true Health Moonshot mission, to make it so that every single diagnostic test result will be right the first time. They’re having success in Alzheimer’s, and they’re just getting started. Join us in welcoming Veravas to StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community.
Connect with Veravas via email
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Published: Dec 5, 2024