Bio-Prodigy

Bio-Prodigy Shana Kelley is launching her second company with a device that could change the way medicine is practiced and she's not even 40. Imagine a handheld device that could test patients for disease in minutes, letting doctors know—without a biopsy or lengthy waiting period—which patients were infected with a dangerous strain of bacteria or aggressive form of cancer. For Shana Kelley, that’s the plan. Kelley is a biochemist in the University of Toronto’s schools of medicine and pharmacy. At 39, she’s already proven her chops in the biosensing field, having founded one successful company, and is now preparing to launch another. Technology Review named her one of the top 100 innovators in 2004, when she was an assistant professor at Boston College. By 2008, just 2 years after she moved her lab to Toronto, the Globe & Mail named her one of Canada’s “Top 40 Under 40.” And she’s just getting started. Kelley stumbled into science accidentally. She’d worked in a bank after high school and originally planned to study business. “But I got to university, took some business classes, and didn’t like it,” she says. A perceptive advisor pointed out that she’d done well in high school science and suggested she give the field a try. “Once I got going in the lab, I was really hooked,” she says. Later, pursuing a doctorate in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, she worked on “very fundamental science,” investigating whether DNA acted more like an insulator or a conductor when a charge passed through it. It was another happy accident when, in the course of that basic research, her team discovered that DNA did have the ability to carry a charge—and that ability was impacted by mismatches in a DNA sequence. “We realized that we’d be able to detect single base changes” by measuring changes in charge, she says. Based on that finding, Kelley and her colleagues founded GeneOhm Sciences, a San Diego–based company that developed nucleic acid–based diagnostic assays to rapidly screen for bacterial organisms. Medical technology company Becton- Dickinson acquired the company in 2006. Since then, she’s driven the biosensing idea even further—and Toronto was the perfect place to do that, she says. She met her husband, Ted Sargent, a professor of engineering at the University of Toronto, while he was on sabbatical in Boston. Looking for an institution that would accommodate them both, they found that Toronto stood out. Although they had offers elsewhere, Kelley says, Toronto offered the strongest departments for each of them. “The main driver was seeing a really unique environment here for somebody who was working at the interface of biology, chemistry, and engineering,” she says. Working at that interface has been fruitful. At GeneOhm Sciences, Kelley says, she realized that good diagnostic tools required more than just an assay. Relying on manual processing of samples was slow and expensive. What was needed, she decided, was an automated device that could screen samples quickly and routinely. To develop that device, she teamed up with Sargent. The result is an electronic chip that can detect clinical biomarkers for cancers and infectious diseases in a single drop of blood or urine. The sensors contain highly branched electrodes, carefully structured on the nanoscale. Affixed to the electrodes are nucleic acid probes “that we’ve designed to be complementary to whatever we want to fish out of our sample,” Kelley explains. If the target disease biomarker is present in a sample, its nucleic acid strands bind to the probes and trigger a change in charge at the sensor’s surface. By measuring the charges, the highly sensitive device can quickly and accurately detect the presence of disease in a sample of just 100 molecules. Fei-Fei Liu, a molecular oncologist at the Ontario Cancer Institute of the University Health Network (UHN), partnered with Kelley to test the nanochip by measuring certain microRNAs in human cancer cell lines using quantitative realtime PCR. Meanwhile Kelley’s lab tested the same sample with her new chip. “We found an excellent correlation between the ‘gold standard’ [PCR] and the new platform, demonstrating the proof of principle that indeed their technology is actually quite sensitive, and is very useful,” Liu says. Liu describes Kelley as a “Superwoman of a scientist.” Each month, Liu, Kelley, and UHN clinician Aaron Schimmer get together to bounce ideas around in informal, interdisciplinary meetings. During these sessions, Kelley’s commitment and dedication to the bigger picture are clear, Liu says. “She really wants to address complex biomedical problems, which is not easy to do. Most basic chemists don’t really like doing that,” she adds. “She’s amazing.” After a number of successful trials, Kelley says she’s confident that her system is ready to move forward. Now she’s working to raise funds to launch a company to take the device to market. Kelley is a "Superwoman of a scientist," says Fei-Fei Liu at the UHN's Ontario Cancer Institute. Kelley’s sensor is so forward-looking, however, that “there’s a danger you could be ahead of the curve” when it comes to cancer, she says. Many promising cancer biomarkers have been identified, “but there’s actually quite a bit of validation that needs to be done” to confirm they truly correlate with the disease before she can confidently move ahead with systems to detect them, Kelley explains. In the meantime, she plans to market a version of the device for infectious-disease monitoring. That’s just fine with Michael Gardam, the director of infectious diseases at the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion. “I’ve had a series of meetings with [Kelley] over the last couple years about our mutual interest in screening for superbugs in hospitals,” he says. He likes what he’s heard. Screening every patient admitted to the hospital for virulent bacteria like MRSA and C. difficile is one of the most effective ways of controlling the infections, Gardam says. “The big problem with doing screening is the fact that it takes a long time to get the results back,” he says—around 24 hours for the agar-based screening method currently used at UHN, where he practices. “The big advantage to [Kelley’s] work is that it allows much faster turnaround times.” Kelley is optimistic that her new company will get off the ground in 2010 and is devoting plenty of energy to making that happen. “Very often, analytical chemists develop things, we publish our papers, and we hope that somebody else will pick it up and deal with the more complicated problems. But we’ve really pushed forward. We found that we could make it work,” she says. “Maybe 5 years ago, I wasn’t sure we’d get there. And I’m really delighted that we have.”

Bio-Prodigy

Bio-Prodigy

Shana Kelley is launching her second company with a device that could change the way medicine is practiced and she's not even 40.

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Kirsten Weir

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December 2010

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