Reading the Immune Response Instead of the Infection

Few medical decisions seem so simple, yet create so much uncertainty: Is the infection bacterial, and therefore potentially in need of antibiotics, or viral, meaning antibiotics will not help? For years, physicians have tried to answer that question using symptoms, blood tests and tests that directly search for the virus or bacteria. Israeli company MeMed chose to look in a different direction: instead of searching for the invader, read the body’s response to it. The result is MeMed BV, a blood test that can help physicians distinguish between bacterial and viral infections in about 15 minutes.

The story began at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where Eran Eden and Kfir Oved met as students. Eden moved between computer science and biology and later completed a PhD in systems biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science; Oved studied medicine and immunology at the Technion. The two had already worked together on problems involving the immune system, but they were looking for a major medical challenge where the combination of biology, medicine and data analysis could produce a practical solution. One of the most pressing was unnecessary antibiotic use: when it is unclear whether an illness is bacterial or viral, doctors sometimes have little choice but to prescribe antibiotics “just in case.”

That led in 2009 to the idea that would become MeMed. The key was understanding that the immune system does not respond in the same way to every infection. Instead of trying to detect a bacterium in the throat, lungs or elsewhere in the body, it is possible to measure the “fingerprint” that the body’s fight against it leaves in the blood.