The grant is a fast-track phase I/II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
Currently, the standard diagnostic tool for the evaluation of cardiovascular disease is x-ray angiography. This procedure requires inserting a catheter into the arteries of patients and administering a dye to visualize arterial obstruction. In the US alone, an estimated 3.3 million angiograms are performed annually at a total cost of over $6 billion. This diagnostic procedure is highly invasive and has a small but significant death and injury rate.
The contrast agent being developed by BioPal is designed to increase the efficacy of a cardiovascular diagnostic tool called magnetic resonance angiography, or MRA. The combination of the tool and the agent represent a potentially less invasive and more cost effective method to obtain high-resolution images of the cardiovascular system.
“One very interesting application of our MRA Proton Cascade technology is in the development of new drugs for treating cardiovascular disease” said Dr Dennis Vaccaro, BioPAL chairman. “Our MRA reagents could be used by biotech and pharmaceutical researchers to non-invasively measure, over long periods of time in the same individual, the ability of promising new drugs to shrink or eliminate arterial occlusions. This technology could help to dramatically speed up drug discovery and development in cardiovascular disease.”