Research Areas: Other Diseases

Wegener’s Disease

“Hidden Patterns” and Correlogic’s pattern recognition and discovery technology have been applied to Wegener’s disease to distinguish active disease from remission. Accurate determination of remission is difficult, but essential to calibrate powerful immuno-suppressive drug therapy.  By pinpointing when stable remission has been achieved, our approach could help determine when to discontinue or reduce toxic drug therapy; conversely, doctors could resume timely lower dose therapy before actual recurrence.

Our Wegener’s research was conducted with scientists from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Boston University School of Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center, Duke University, University of California at SF, University of Michigan Medical School and NCI/FDA.  This study, "A Serum Proteomic Approach to Gauging the State of Remission in Wegener’s Granulomatosis", appears in the March 2005 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Arthritis and Rheumatism, marking the first publication of the application of Correlogic’s “Hidden Patterns” approach and technology to detection of non-cancer diseases.

Pheochromocytoma

Metastatic lesions occur in up to 36 percent of patients with pheochromocytoma.  Currently there is no reliable way to detect or predict which patients are at risk for metastatic pheochromocytoma.   In a study conducted with government researchers, we demonstrated the applicability of our pattern discovery and recognition to differential diagnosis of malignant and benign disease. We identified combinations of low molecular weight molecules that could distinguish 100 percent of metastatic pheochromocytomas from benign cases in a blinded validation set.  This research, "Low molecular weight proteomic information distinguishes metastatic from benign pheochromocytoma," appears in the June 2005, edition of the peer-reviewed journal Endocrine-Related Cancer.

GVHD

Correlogic’s technology has also been applied to detection of acute graft versus host disease (GVHD).  Rapid rejection of transplanted tissue is a life-threatening complication of tissue transplantation.  Timely detection is difficult because current tissue-based tests are time-consuming and invasive.  Our research, “Accurate diagnosis of acute graft-versus-host disease using serum proteomic pattern analysis” was published in the June 2006 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Experimental Hematology. In this study our team of scientists used Correlogic’s technology to accurately distinguish GVHD samples from both post-transplant non-GVHD samples and pre-transplant samples (100 percent specificity and 100 percent sensitivity in both cases).  We were also able to distinguish pre-transplant from post-transplant non-GVHD samples (100 percent specificity and 94 percent sensitivity).  These results suggest a potential application of our technology as a rapid and accurate method to diagnose acute GVHD.