Devices & Diagnostics, Startups

Bringing blood irradiation back en vogue: Startup uses UV phototherapy treat infections in the bloodstream

Diseased cells circulate around our bloodstream, which allows their spread throughout our bodies. What if there were […]

Diseased cells circulate around our bloodstream, which allows their spread throughout our bodies. What if there were a way to filter out the bad cells while letting the good ones thrive?

Santa Barbara-based startup UVLRx is developing a device that feeds different UV lights into a patient’s bloodstream, with an intent of killing diseased cells or pathogens while allowing the healthy ones to survive. The procedure takes an hour to irradiate a patient’s blood. It has the most potential in infection control – inside and outside of a hospital setting – and could potentially be used in conjunction with pharmaceuticals to rid a patient of disease faster, UVLRx managing director Paul LeMert said.

The company just raised $385,000 in equity, according to a regulatory filing.

Phototherapy has a storied history – it was big in the 1930s and 1940s – but fell from grace around the advent of antibiotics. UVLRx hopes to bring this technology back en vogue – by proving it works. But there’s a lot of work to be done.

“We’re now in the middle of a strict regulatory process, so we’re not making any specific claims about what the device does,” LeMert said. “But the wavelengths we employ have been shown to do a lot of things – particularly damage and destroy pathogens like viruses, fungus and bacteria.”

Since it doesn’t have FDA clearance or a CE Mark, UVLRx wants to makes sure its regulatory T’s are crossed before it makes any broad claims about the efficacy of its device. It’s currently in the midst of safety and efficacy trials with the Institutional Review Board, LeMert said. It’s studying the device’s function in a number of conditions, including Lyme disease, in the U.S., the Netherlands, Cairo, Hongkong, the Philippines and other countries.

 

UVLRx believes the pathogens it chases reacts differently to the different wavelengths than do healthy cells, LeMert said. Other claims floating around about blood phototherapy include boosting the immune system, oxygen levels, and the functioning of ATP and mitochondria. The company says:

The UVLrx System was designed to provide comprehensive care. The use of UV light has been used for decades as a viable means to eradicate pathogens, but within a human host, successful management of an infectious disease not only requires suppression of the pathogen but also stabilization of the host’s response to the pathogen. The release of pro-inflammatory cytokines can rapidly elevate body temperature having deleterious effects on tissue and organ function. This is best highlighted within patients battling the Ebola virus. The virus itself is not directly causing the observable symptoms; it is the body’s response to the virus that can have lethal consequences, such as elevated body temperature. The UVLrx System delivers multiple wavelengths to affect multiple biochemical pathways concurrently. Like any other form of care today, a comprehensive therapeutic approach is critical for achieving both meaningful and sustainable management.

The LED-based device (it’s not a laser, so no heat’s produced) is being examined as a class 2 medical device,

Here’s how it works: The company sends three different wavelengths of light coursing through a patient’s body – UVA, UVB and UVC. It does this with an IV input that’s similar to an standard saline drip – except that instead of fluids, the device feeds a fiberoptic cable into a patient’s veins. Here’s a video:

 

 

UV blood irradiation has been a concept for many decades – doctors in the 1930s and 1940s would extract a patient’s blood, for instance, treat it with UV light and then transfuse it back into the body. It’s unclear whether such therapy used legitimate science or borderline quackery – but the results are strong enough that blood-based phototherapy certain warrants a second research go-around.

According to the blog Science Based Medicine, the old UV story goes:

Back in the 1930’s a physician named Knott had two patients, one with a brain abscess and one with sepsis, who he evidently cured by irradiating the patients’ blood and returning it to them.*  His rationale was since cutaneous TB can be cured by UV light (the discovery resulted in the 1903 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology), perhaps other infections would be amenable to the therapy as well (1).250 to 300 cc is the average amount of blood withdrawn, irradiated and returned to the patient.  Given the mythical 70 kg human has about 5 liters of blood, that would mean they were ‘treating’ about 6% blood volume, which is irradiated for 10 seconds. Hardly seems a sufficient volume  and time for treatment of anything.  These studies were done at the beginning of the antibiotic era when sulfa antibiotics were the only commonly used agents.

The blog outlines that there were across-the-board success stories for these irradiation techniques – even though it treated maybe 6 percent of blood volume. Still, claims rolled in that this therapy showed the following efficacy rates:

Results of recovery were 100% for early infections, 46 out of 47 for moderately advanced, and 17 out of 36  of those who were  moribund. Staphylococcus had a high death rate, but those patients were also using sulfa drugs, which may have inhibited  the  effectiveness of the UV irradiation treatments. In fact, when Miley reviewed  his  data,  he found that all the Staph failures had been on sulfa. A second series of nine patients (six Staph aureus, three Staph albus) had  a  100% recovery rate with one or two treatments when sulfa was not used.

The blog rightly points out:

When a treatment seems too good to be true it probably is.  The stories are so uniformly positive with no side effects it doesn’t seem legitimate, but I have no way to know without access to the original data. He waxes desperate with imagination…Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. But the papers don’t ‘smell’ right.

Then the therapy just vanishes in the medical literature and I can’t determine why.  There wasn’t a seminal study that demonstrated UV blood irradiation was not effective.  Evidently it was a fad that just vanished like hula hoops, mullet haircuts and Uggs (well, I can wish).

There are even conspiracy theories, LeMert said, directed at the pharmaceutical industry about the advent of antibiotics blocking the rise of light therapy in medicine: Penicillin was a far cheaper commodity than complex UV devices back in the 1940s, so the pharma industry blocked the latter’s development, some say.

In any case, such skepticism is likely why UVLRx is remaining so guarded about its scientific claims at present. It’s why UVLRx is doing the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multisite trials – to lend some serious credence to an old therapy. After all, it’s very well a mode of treatment that’s worth bringing back to the conversation – look at psilocybin’s disappearance from medical research, and its recent resurgence into the academic dialogue. There may be something yet from these shelved therapies.

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