William Bauta to Spearhead Product Development at bioAffinity Technologies

bioAffinity Technologies Inc. has named William Bauta, Ph.D., as chief science officer. Before joining bioAffinity in 2016 as senior vice president of Research and Development, Dr. Bauta was associate director of Science at Genzyme Corporation and held a similar position at Ilex Products Inc., where he was responsible for the discovery, development and U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of therapeutics in the companies’ pipelines, and manager of Medicinal and Process Chemistry at Southwest Research Institute.

Dr. Bauta is responsible for multiple company inventions and patents supporting bioAffinity’s diagnostic and therapeutic advancements, including improvements to optimize CyPath Lung, a noninvasive test to detect early-stage lung cancer, that both improved performance and cut costs. His discoveries have expanded the company’s patent portfolio and added to a growing list of publications. In addition to bioAffinity patents on which he is a named inventor, he holds multiple healthcare-related patents and has published in more than a dozen scientific journals, including the journal Science.

“Dr. Bauta brings both scientific rigor and business acumen to the CSO position as we accelerate the commercial rollout of our CyPath Lung test and expand our development pipeline. He will work with a scientific team that developed our high throughput, automated diagnostic platform to accurately analyze the lung microenvironment, allowing us to advance new technologies that can detect early-stage diseases. He is focused on making our products important steps in the care pathway for diagnosing early-stage disease,” bioAffinity President/CEO Maria Zannes said.

Dr. Bauta earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society. His post-doctoral studies were at the University of Texas at Austin under a National Institutes of Health fellowship.

Dr. Bauta succeeds Vivienne I. Rebel, M.D., Ph.D., who retired from her position on Oct. 31 as executive vice president and chief science and medical officer. Dr. Rebel joined the company in 2016 and led the research and development of CyPath Lung.

“We wish Dr. Rebel the very best in retirement,” Zannes concluded. “Vivienne has made an indelible mark on us all. Her scientific precision and innovative spirit will remain a hallmark of bioAffinity Technologies.”

CyPath Lung uses proprietary advanced flow cytometry and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify cell populations in patient sputum that indicate malignancy. Automated data analysis helps determine whether cancer is present or not. CyPath Lung incorporates a fluorescent porphyrin that is preferentially taken up by cancer and cancer-related cells. Clinical study results demonstrated that CyPath Lung had 92% sensitivity, 87% specificity and 88% accuracy in detecting lung cancer in patients at high risk for the disease who had small lung nodules less than 20 millimeters. Diagnosing and treating early-stage lung cancer can improve outcomes and increase patient survival.

bioAffinity Technologies Inc. addresses the need for noninvasively diagnosing early-stage cancer and other diseases of the lung and broad-spectrum cancer treatments. Its first product, CyPath Lung, is a noninvasive test that has shown high sensitivity, specificity and accuracy for detecting early-stage lung cancer. CyPath Lung is marketed as a Laboratory Developed Test (LDT) by Precision Pathology Laboratory Services, a subsidiary of bioAffinity Technologies.