What if doctors could more accurately diagnose and monitor blood cancer with a simple blood draw? This vision is becoming a reality thanks to research at Rapid Novor, a Waterloo-based company co-founded by Dr. Bin Ma, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo. Myeloma is a type of blood cancer that grows in the bone marrow.
Typically, patients must undergo multiple bone marrow biopsies to diagnose the disease and to assess the treatment. However, this procedure is painful and invasive.
"Basically, the doctor has to insert a thick needle into the bone to extract marrow," Ma says. "Then they test it to see if there are any cancer cells inside of it. Even after treatment, this procedure needs to be repeated once or twice a year to detect possible relapse."
Most people diagnosed with myeloma are older than 65. Some may have mobility issues and fragile bones, making the biopsy procedure even more risky.
To address these challenges, Rapid Novor created EasyM, a non-invasive and highly sensitive blood-based test that traces a biomarker for myeloma called M-protein. Essentially, a physician can collect blood from a patient and send it off for analysis. Using EasyM, a lab can check if the sample contains M-protein and measure its quantity.
What's key to EasyM i's de novo sequencing, a computational biology technique that can determine the amino acid sequence of a protein. M-protein is a classic biomarker for myeloma. However, the sensitivity of the existing method for M-protein measurement is too low due to interference from other proteins in blood.
"The amino acid sequence can help us differentiate the M-protein from other similar but normal proteins in the blood," explains Ma, a pioneer in computational biology. "The experimental data is very noisy and has errors. Our team developed the de novo sequencing algorithm to figure out the sequence from the noisy data."
Every patient's M-protein sequence is unique - almost like a fingerprint - making it easier to diagnose and monitor myeloma. A doctor can compare a patient's M-protein quantities at various time points to see if their cancer has improved.
Recently, Rapid Novor received a licence from the Ministry of Health, allowing clinics across Ontario to use EasyM. This milestone paves the way for Canadians to have access to a non-invasive tool for myeloma.
Importantly, EasyM can detect relapse two to eleven months earlier than the current standard of care. This benefit is attributed to EasyM's high sensitivity and painless approach, which enables the early detection of the M-protein rise before the relapse and encourages frequent patient check-ups.
EasyM is not only more sensitive but also more effective. Myeloma can happen anywhere in the bone marrow. But as Ma puts it, "if the doctor is not digging in the right place," they may receive misleading results on the patient's progress.
In contrast, M-protein produced by the myeloma cells circulate in the blood throughout your body, meaning that you get the same readings wherever you take the blood. This is particularly important, as Ma's research has found that patients who were deemed myeloma-free by the biopsy method still showed detectable levels of the M-protein in their blood.
For Ma, EasyM has been a 10-year journey. What motivated him was knowing that his pioneering work in computational biology could put an end to patient suffering.
"This problem was brought to us at a conference, and we happen to have the technology," he says. "By chance, if you have a solution to a real-world problem, you feel like it's your responsibility to make it happen to the people who need it the most."
He also credits the University's intellectual property (IP) policy, which grants Waterloo members ownership of their creations. This agency, complemented by Waterloo's strong entrepreneurial ecosystem, empowers Waterloo researchers to turn their ideas into innovative solutions that drive real-world impact.
