Brain aneurysms can appear without any prior symptoms. Diagnosis is invasive and expensive. Monitoring progression can be a guessing game. And if they rupture, which happens to about 30,000 people in the U.S. each year, there is only a 50/50 chance of making it to a hospital alive.
Roughly a third of those who do make it to the hospital alive never leave, and those that do often face lifelong disabilities.
A Pitt Department of Neurosurgery resident and a third-year School of Medicine student, want to bring a new blood test for brain aneurysms to market that can accurately and less invasively detect brain aneurysms and measure the risk of rupture, giving clinicians much more direction in determining when to provide treatment.
Working with the Pitt Innovation Institute, part of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, they formed a company, Astria Biosciences, to bring the test to market. Recently, the students, Adi Mittal and Rob Dembinski, participated in the Rice Business Plan Competition, in Houston, TX, which bills itself as the largest graduate student pitch competition in the nation. They manage to reach the top 14 semi-finalists of 42 teams.
