Our Mission

Our purpose

Salion GmbH stands for the development of innovative, small, portable, and rapid processing technologies for saliva[1]Saliva as a diagnostic fluid – Saliva is a clinically informative, biological fluid (biofluid) that is useful for novel approaches to prognosis, laboratory or clinical diagnosis, and monitoring … Continue reading samples to allow faster identification of health issues and earlier access to treatment. Our fast and cost effective, non-invasive salivary diagnosis enables the testing of a wide range of various inflammatory conditions.

The tryptophan metabolite kynurenine serves as a biomarker for this purpose.

Our main focus is on the detection and quantification of the inflammatory process of organ transplant rejection. The existence of a test for patients to diagnose any harm to their transplant directly increases the level of long-term patient safety as well as the quality of care that physicians can deliver. The innovative principle in our test is the application of saliva as a basis for lateral flow analysis

 

Origin

Working for decades in transplantation medicine the co-founders of Salion, Prof. D. Abendroth and P.D. M. Stangl, are keenly aware of the importance of an early diagnosis of inflammation and rejection status of solid organ transplantation. As, at the moment, there is no standardized testing procedure to detect early rejection in asymptomatic patients, Salion provides an innovative and revolutionary solution. 

Point of care testing allows patients and medical staff to accurately achieve real time, lab-quality diagnostic results within minutes from any location, rather requiring laboratory diagnosis and hours of processing.

In 2007 Prof. D. Abendroth (University Ulm) and PD Dr. M. Stangl (then Head of Transplantation and Liver Surgery at the Technical University of Munich) decided to investigate the use of kynurenine testing for the early detection of rejection episodes after clinical renal transplantation.

Despite advances in organ transplant over the years the long term outcomes have not improved. The number of patients who need to be relisted for another organ transplant has been continuously increasing.

This number is directly proportionate to the increasing numbers of organ transplants in general. Currently three percent of all transplanted patients each year suffer from organ rejection.

Subclinical rejection of the transplant is one of the main problems that threaten long term results. Cellular infiltration is synonymous with inflammation and respectively rejection as shown through biopsies in up to 30 % of clinical asymptomatic patients (by Metha R, Sood P, Hariharan S  “Subclinical Rejection in Renal Transplantation: Reappraised.” Transplantation (2016) 100(8): 1610-8).

Thus, it is of paramount import to detect the process of subclinical rejection as early as possible, in order to minimise negative long term results.

 

References

References
1 Saliva as a diagnostic fluid – Saliva is a clinically informative, biological fluid (biofluid) that is useful for novel approaches to prognosis, laboratory or clinical diagnosis, and monitoring and management of patients with both oral and systemic diseases. It is easily collected and stored and ideal for the early detection of diseases as it contains specific, soluble biological markers (biomarkers). Saliva contains multiple biomarkers which make it useful for multiplexed assays that are being developed as point-of-care (POC) devices, rapid tests, or in more standardized formats for centralized clinical laboratory operations.