Protein breakdown, when occurring naturally in the body, can be relatively harmless, but when this process is the result of disease, it can have dangerous outcomes. Researchers and students from the MIT Portugal Program hope a new biotechnology they are developing will have an impact on treating patients with medical complications from abnormal protein breakdown.  Mariana Fernandes Detecting the pace of this process in medical patients is crucial to addressing harmful conditions such as muscle wasting that result from protein breakdown caused by cancer, HIV or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. "Our technology is a tracer-based metabolic test for protein breakdown. It is innovative test that detects protein breakdown much earlier than the available tests," said David Malta, a PhD student in MIT Portugal’s PhD Bio-Engineering program. Listen to an interview with Bio-Teams Student Mariana Fernandes The technology, called Prot|Met, can be used as a predictor for early diagnosis or a follow up to monitor the treatment of muscle wasting and determine if it is evolving in the right direction, Malta said. A key market is Intensive Care Units of hospitals. Malta and fellow MIT Portugal students Mariana Fernandes and Tatiana Aguiar teamed up this spring with researcher John Jones and Pedro Saraiva from the University of Coimbra in Portugal to further develop Prot|Met and create a go-to-market strategy. The students participated in this work as part of a Bio-Teams course within the MIT Portugal Program. The course is modeled after MIT’s Deshpande Center’s i-Teams. "The Bio-Teams Innovation course was a real awakening for the MIT Portugal students. It was a new entrepreneurial experience for them and they accepted the challenge head-on," said MIT Prof. Dava Newman, co-lead of the Bio-Engineering Focus Area of the MIT Portugal Program. MIT Professors including Charles Cooney, Director of the Deshpande Center, and researchers Ken Zolot, Sloan School of Management, and Luis Perez-Breva, School of Engineering, participated in the course and helped develop several events related to the course, including a formal competition. Prot|Met was the winning team in the competition finals held last week in Lisbon. The competition had two prizes, one for 10,000€ and a second for 5,000€ in services, and involved six teams with projects covering several fields in Bio-Engineering, from novel biomedical devices, and new diagnostic tools to commodity products with enhanced properties. The applications of the technologies are mainly in the food, medical and pharmaceutical industries. Prot|Met won both prizes, but the students involved received more that the winnings and accolades that followed. “This experience was unique among our curricula, since it is truly entrepreneurial. It allowed the awakening the little bug called entrepreneurship that lies dormant within all of us and shifted our minds from pure science to pure science with application. It enables us to look with two sets of eyes to everything we do and always evaluate both sides, science and market," said Malta. Malta added that the experience helped the students see that what they investigate at the lab bench can have real purpose and application to real people – with the spirit of entrepreneurship behind it. “This process was a lesson about making things happen. Being able to participate in such a process prepared us for such a journey in the future. This process is an essential tool for all of us; it is the tool of entrepreneurship and innovation. Within this spirit, the importance of a network of contacts was clear for us. It is essential for the development of such projects,” Malta said. The Prot|Met team plans to use the prize to continue to develop the technology and its market focus. The first step of this process will be the validation of the technology as an in vitro diagnostic test. The team plans to develop a network of ICU units within medical centers that will use the Prot|Met test so that the team can validate the test in certain conditions with certain patients. Malta said he expects this process to take about one year with the next steps to include finding a corporate partner to help manufacture and market the technology.
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