Collaboration Advances Sputum-Based Diagnostics for Asthma and COPD

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are highly prevalent inflammatory airway conditions, affecting more than 40 million Americans and more than 650 million people worldwide. A new collaboration now targets development of high‑throughput diagnostics that integrate sputum‑based cellular and proteomic readouts to guide more personalized treatment decisions.

bioAffinity Technologies (San Antonio, TX, USA) and Pictor (Carlsbad, CA, USA) have partnered to develop and commercialize next‑generation diagnostics intended to give clinicians a more complete picture of lung inflammation in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The collaboration combines bioAffinity’s expertise in flow cytometry with Pictor’s targeted proteomic analysis platform to characterize immune cell populations and cytokine patterns associated with airway inflammation. 

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The tests are designed to help match patients to more effective treatments based on their specific inflammatory profile. The work builds on bioAffinity’s proprietary sputum analysis platform that also underpins CyPath Lung, a noninvasive test used to assess the likelihood that a pulmonary nodule is malignant.

The approach integrates multiparameter flow cytometry to differentiate and quantify sputum immune cell subsets with rapid, focused cytokine profiling to capture key inflammatory signals produced by those cells. By unifying these data streams, the partners aim to deliver a laboratory‑friendly workflow that increases throughput, reduces testing complexity, and lowers costs compared with traditional single‑analyte methods. 

The anticipated outcome is a test that supports more informed decisions when considering advanced therapies, including U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)‑approved biologics and emerging targeted treatments. The tests under development are anticipated to be initially offered as Laboratory Developed Tests (LDTs) under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). 

bioAffinity has multiple patents pending related to its asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease testing platform and will own intellectual property arising from the collaboration, while Pictor will retain ownership of its existing targeted proteomic platform intellectual property and new inventions related to it.

“Asthma and COPD are not single diseases. They encompass multiple inflammatory pathways that require different therapeutic approaches. By measuring immune cell populations using flow cytometry and integrating Pictor’s cytokine profiling platform into its test protocol, our new diagnostics are designed to advance precision medicine in asthma and COPD by providing physicians with a more complete understanding of the biological processes driving airway inflammation in real time,” said Gordon Downie, MD, PhD, bioAffinity’s Chief Medical Officer.

“We're excited to partner with bioAffinity Technologies as they continue to develop innovative, non-invasive tests for lung disease. By combining bioAffinity's expertise in immune cell biology with Pictor's scalable proteomic platform, we can advance bioAffinity’s ability to provide insights that move beyond simply identifying disease to understanding the underlying biology of each patient’s condition, leading to more effective treatments,” said Dr. Jamie Platt, CEO of Pictor.

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