Could nanodiamonds help doctors identify dangerous sepsis cases earlier? In Part 2 of our interview with Dr. Romana Schirhagl, we discuss the medical potential of the Quantum Nova microscope technology.
Romana explains how QT Sense is working toward medical device certification and why one of the most promising applications is sepsis triage. By using nanodiamonds as quantum sensors, Quantum Nova can measure stress responses in living cells in real time, helping researchers explore whether patients with suspected sepsis may deteriorate sooner.
Marty Hurwitz: Are you moving forward with trying to get medical certification to sell this into actual hospitals?
Dr. Romana Schirhagl: Yes, this is one of the steps that we would like to take. Currently, one of the most promising trials is for sepsis diagnosis, and that’s where we plan — maybe in the coming year or so — to start a bigger trial to submit for medical device certification.
We’ve now done a smaller trial, a pilot with something like 25 patients so far. Then you need to submit a larger trial with all the paperwork, and then you get your medical device certificate. So yes, this is in the plan somewhere along the way.
Marty Hurwitz: Yes, I know that’s a very complicated process, and I assume you’re hoping to achieve that medical device certification across a lot of different countries as well.
Dr. Romana Schirhagl: Yes. That also makes it more complicated. For example, in the U.S., they want things done on U.S. soil, as you might know. So you need to do your experiments in different countries eventually.
Marty Hurwitz: From my reading on the sepsis identification process, it sounds like Quantum Nova can speed that up dramatically, because you’re measuring cells in real time, as opposed to measuring cells that are dead. Today, figuring out whether sepsis is present usually takes several days or weeks, and you’re basically going to shorten that. That could save a lot of lives, right?
Dr. Romana Schirhagl: What we’re looking at are patients who come into the emergency department with suspected sepsis, and usually what happens is that within a day or two, they either become better or they deteriorate.
What we’d like to do at this early stage, right when they come in, is triage them: this one is going to be fine; this one needs attention. We want to predict what the outcome will be. At this stage, sepsis is also very difficult to diagnose — there’s a really high chance of misdiagnosis. I think one in four, if I remember correctly, is misdiagnosed at that stage.
It’s really difficult to diagnose, and it’s also a stage where the mortality rate increases by 5 to 8 percent for every hour that diagnosis is delayed. So if you diagnose it a day earlier, you can imagine what that means for the patient. You can hopefully still help those patients. This is also one of the biggest applications where we can really have an impact.
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Marty Hurwitz: What else are you working on that you can share with us for the future? Or what expansion of Quantum Nova do you see happening in the next generation?
Dr. Romana Schirhagl: On the one hand, we’re still working a lot on making it more user-friendly. I think eventually it would be ideal if you could just place a sample and leave. Especially if you consider a nurse in the ICU or the emergency department — they don’t want to play with equipment. They need to treat their patients.
So you’d like to have some automation there. Right now it’s already better than where we started, but it’s still not quite at the point where you can just place the sample and leave. The other thing where automation helps a lot is making the decision-making process more robust, more reproducible, and less dependent on the user.
This is still a big part: making it self-driving, if you want. Then we’re also looking forward — can we combine it with other readouts to make what we get out of it even more meaningful? Another factor is throughput. At the moment, we typically measure very few cells. But if you think about pharma, for example, they always want to measure many cells, right?
Right now, we measure in these small plates, so you can measure a few cells, but we’re now moving to well plates. In pharma, they’re used to using well plates. For example, a 96-well plate has 96 containers where there’s a sample. One of the goals is to make our technology compatible with that, so you can use their well plates and then test all those 96 drugs that they put in their wells — or however many they want to fill.
Throughput is another big thing we’re working on. It requires, for example, automated sampling, because there’s not much use in having a 96-well plate if the user still has to sit next to it and add something every time. Then you might as well not have high throughput. So these are things we’re working on.
