BIO from the BAYOU: Build Your Biotech Network with Key Opinion Leaders and Investors
12 Feb 2025 · 13 min
0:00
In this episode of Bio from the Bayou, host Dr. Elaine Hamm (Executive in Residence, Tulane School of Medicine) and Business Development Associate Alexis Dacoti discuss several translational research assets emerging from Tulane. They begin by outlining a curiosity‑driven framework for evaluating new technologies, balancing scientific excitement with commercial viability. The conversation then shifts to Dr. Tony Hu’s CRISPR‑based, portable diagnostics for tuberculosis, including a rapid, low‑cost assay that earned FDA breakthrough device designation and a dual HIV‑TB test that uses a finger‑prick blood sample. Next, they explore triple‑negative breast cancer (TNBC) research led by Dr. Bridget Collins‑Burrow and Matt Burrow, who have built a patient‑derived xenograft (PDX) biobank from diverse New Orleans patients, emphasizing representation of African‑American women. The duo, together with USDA collaborator Mark Mondrinos, investigates plant‑stress‑induced natural compounds (e.g., from grapefruit and soybeans) that show anti‑angiogenic activity in TNBC models, potentially serving as dietary therapeutics or drug leads. The episode concludes with reflections on which assets have immediate impact—primarily the CRISPR diagnostics—and which are still watch‑list, such as the natural‑product pipeline, while noting that Hu’s technology has spun out into a startup and the PDX models are now available for industry collaboration.
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Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. Hello, and welcome back to Bio from the Bayou. I'm Dr. Elaine Hamm, Executive in Residence at Tulane University School of Medicine. And today I have with me—
Alexis Dacoti. I'm the Business Development Associate at the Tulane School of Medicine.
And you might remember him from episode 53, and he's here today to give an update on some of the incredible assets that we have here at Tulane. Today, we originally talked about kind of talking about the commercial viability about these different assets, but Anytime I start looking at the commercial viability of a technology, and I have a whole rubric that I go through, I'm sure anybody in BD goes through, where they go through and think about value proposition, product-market fit, all of these different things. Before I do any of that, I really like to put my science geek hat on and just get excited about the raw discovery of it, whether it's trying to understand a mechanism of a disease or looking at a novel target. I like to think about where the research could go if all the pieces came together. And I think that curiosity really drives the next step of figuring out what gaps need to be filled, what are the barriers that exist, and like what's real and what's just hype. So I really, when I start to look at new technologies, I start, why is this cool? And then I move into how could this work in real-world setting. So, I, I really think that balance of curiosity and pragmatism is why I got into science. So, today's episode, I'm gonna have you, Alexis, put on your science geek hat with me and talk about some of the cool research that's occurring at Tulane. So, first, I wanted to talk a little bit about Dr. Tony Hughes' work on tuberculosis detection. And TB is one of those diseases that always just feels like an old-timey disease to me. When I think of, like, TB, I think of the Old West and spittoons.
Victorian damsels coughing blood into a little cloth.
Yeah, exactly. The tubercular heroine in opera in La Bohème, just a way of dying of consumption. And it is very sort of old-timey feeling to me, but really It still kills around like 11 million people worldwide. And in fact, there's an outbreak in Kansas right now that's probably one of the largest that we have since we've been detecting TB and reporting it since the, I think the 1950s. And so one of the things about TB is diagnosing it is really hard. And in part because the bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is such a weirdo bug. It is such a, a strange bug. pathogen because it goes intracellular and it can remain dormant in your body for years, sometimes even decades. And so you may not have, you may be carrying it, but you may not have active disease. And so I think that's super interesting and that makes diagnosing, however, really hard. So talk to me a little bit about Tony's work in this particular area.
Right. So yeah, like you said, one of the issues that we have, you said dormant, so we have what's called latent tuberculosis, which is asymptomatic. And when the bacteria become active, potentially way down the line, potentially, oh, now you have active tuberculosis, you're dying. So it would be ideal to be able to pick these things up sooner and cheaply, that if you believe that you've been to an area where you might have picked up tuberculosis, but you're not experiencing any symptoms, well, let's check. But these tests can be expensive. They can take some time to get your results back. And so a lot of Tony's work has been focused on developing new assays that can— one, are cheaper than existing assays, faster. And that can also be more portable. So in a lot of the countries where you do have higher rates of tuberculosis, you might not also have the infrastructure for some of these, like, more advanced tests. And so he's developed portable— these are CRISPR-based tuberculosis diagnostics. One of them recently received, like, FDA breakthrough device approval, showing that the FDA actually recognizes that it could innovate over existing tests. That's pretty big. It's showing that they're potentially providing a faster path to market for it and recognizing that this is important.
Yeah. So if I recall, Tony is looking at specifically using CRISPR-based tests. And when I think of CRISPR, I typically think of therapeutics and gene therapy, that type of thing. How and why is he using the CRISPR-based test for TB?
So there are a few reasons here. As you mentioned, this bacterium may not be producing a lot of signs in the body, right? But one of the advantages of what's called this CRISPR system is that it kind of hones in on specific pieces of genetic material and attaches to them. And so when it does that, like, very precisely, you can then specifically amplify those signals from these trace amounts that may be in the blood or in serum or in the body and get a really strong, like, ultrasensitive signal, high accuracy, that can show that tuberculosis is present.
That's really cool. And he's not just looking at TB, he's also looking at an HIV-TB dual diagnostic, which I think is really interesting because those 2 diseases can tend to potentiate each other. You see patients that have HIV can also have TB, and the TB actually can exacerbate HIV to turn into full-blown AIDS. And so being able to detect both would be, I think, probably pretty interesting.
Right. Yeah. So one of the issues is that with the potential immunosuppression of HIV and AIDS, You're, I think, 15 to 20 times more likely to get a tuberculosis infection. But you also have other issues. For instance, the presence of HIV can actually decrease the amount of spit that would normally be used for tests. So it can interfere with the detection of tuberculosis. And so having these sort of ultrasensitive tests that are also blood-based— these are essentially a finger prick of blood and can pick up both of these diseases at the same time.
All right, Alexis. Now let's switch gears from TB to TNBC, or triple negative breast cancer. Triple negative breast cancer is a very strange form of breast cancer, and it's interesting because it also impacts African American women at a much higher rate than other groups. And it's also known to have worse clinical outcomes compared to women of European descent that have that disease. And so Talk to me a little bit about some of the research that we're doing in New Orleans.
New Orleans is sort of globally considered this nexus of culture, and part of that comes from a really unique demographic. So, for instance, we have a high proportion of Black patients. And as you mentioned, like, you see higher incidence of triple-negative breast cancer in these patients. You see potentially worse outcomes. So a couple of our researchers, Bridget Collins-Burrow, she's an MD-PhD, and her husband, Matt Burrow, they have kind of devoted a large portion of their career to studying breast cancer and in particular triple-negative breast cancer. And so through Dr. Collinsboro's work as an oncologist, they've actually been able to gather tumor samples from triple-negative breast cancer patients in the New Orleans area and develop these into tumor models that you could actually use to study in greater depth the full spectrum of the disease across different demographics, across patients of African ancestry, when oftentimes if you're testing drugs, if you're doing molecular studies and trying to understand how this cancer works and what makes it so challenging to treat, you might only be looking primarily at patients from European ancestry, and you wanna be able to get that full picture.
Yeah, that's such an important piece of drug discovery and drug development is that you're testing your drug in a patient population or in samples from patients that actually reflect the disease itself. And that's something that we always need to be cognizant of because even though it is a mouse, and a mouse is not a human in general, the, the more we can make it like a patient population, the better outcomes we can potentially predict in testing it in a, as close to real model as we possibly can. So something that Matt is working on, Matt Burrow is working on, that I think is very interesting is this idea of looking at naturally occurring compounds from food as a way to implement a therapeutic into your diet. Talk a little bit about that because how they do it, I think, is very interesting.
Yeah. They're doing this project in combination with the USDA and another researcher at Tulane, Mark Mondrinos. What they are doing is they look at these compounds that get produced by plants when they're stressed. Plants mount a defense mechanism, they start changing their biology.
That's so crazy! Like, I love that. I mean, and you don't think about plants, like, mounting this immune— like, a defense. I love that. That's interesting.
And so you potentially have this, like, wealth of compounds that are naturally occurring that could be supplemented via diet are potentially extracted that can have these effects on the body that we're just not familiar with, right? So they've been looking at a compound from grapefruit and some others from soybeans, and they found that when you apply them to tumor models, you actually get decreased production or decreased growth of blood vessels that would reach out into the surrounding tissue, and that tumor needs to survive. And so with these compounds that are just produced by plants, you could potentially inhibit tumor growth.
That's interesting. Although I tend to picture, like, these large farms where we're just really stressing out grapefruit.
I know. I don't like that. How does the grapefruit feel just shouting at it?
But it's such an interesting idea of changing a plant's physiology, and that new physiological existence of a plant can actually be used to blur the lines of nutritional science and pharmacology.
Right. And the other thing is, you know, if you find these compounds that have these effects, they could also potentially be templates for newly designed drugs. Maybe you can start there, make a few changes, and find something that has even greater efficacy.
I mean, we've seen that a lot in drug development of finding things in nature and, like, I mean, antibiotics, tamoxifen, all of these things. Things that are aspirin. Yeah, exactly. There's things that, I mean, even what we talked about CRISPR. I mean, that's, that was something from bacteria. So, Taking tools that are already existing in nature and being able to harness them and find new ways to apply that to human health, I think, is super interesting. All right. Well, we've covered a lot today from TB to TNBC. And which of these areas do you think has the most immediate potential for real-world impact? And what do you think is sort of still in the watch-this-space phase?
I would definitely say these diagnostics If they can be— they're for tuberculosis and HIV. If they can be quickly put into the market, if they can be fully validated, this has the potential to help millions of people across the world. But I am excited to see potential developments in this natural product space. I've been seeing more of it. The Barrow Lab was actually reached out to a couple natural products companies recently to test these things in their TNBC tumor models.
Yeah.
Because I think there's a— it's gaining growing traction, and it's hard to see exactly where it will go, but I think it's fascinating.
That's great. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Alexis. You can now take your geek hat off and, or it may already still be on in general, but thanks for joining me today. And I can't wait to talk about some more fun science things with you next time.
Sounds great.
Yeah. And in fact, Dr. Tony Hu, his technologies have been spun out into a startup company and Matt Burrow and Collins Burrow's PDX model are available for testing now. So can't wait to see where we can help take technologies utilizing these tools. As always, make sure to check out the informational links posted in our show notes to connect with these incredible investigators and learn more about their technologies. Thank you once again for joining us.
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