Dr. Panebianco
Chief Medical Officer, SpectraNomix

After a 10 year career as Medical Director of the Mind-Body Medicine Clinic for the Veteran Administration at the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Panebianco became the Chief Medical Officer for a Tucson-based biotechnology company called SpectraNomix.

SpectraNomix is well positioned to contribute significantly to the Covid-19 testing needs of the pandemic due to proprietary technological innovations to detect changes in biological fluids through intrinsic fluorescent signals associated with Covid-19 metabolic byproducts.

“As a result of ascertaining the metabolic impact of Covid-19 beyond the genetic or antigenic detection of other testing formats, there is a high likelihood that the SpectraNomix testing format will more avidly capture future viral Covid-19 strains that are expected over time. We have already seen the impact of newer strains of SARS-CoV-2 on genomic targets used by some PCR tests, a South African strain that has been found to cause more severe illness in young people without pre-existing conditions, as well as another variant with two specific mutations that was less susceptible to neutralizing antibodies from plasma than the wild-type virus.

Additionally, both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are checking if the variants can escape the antibodies generated by their respective vaccines. Once the SpectraNomix Covid-19 testing platform is up and running, we expect to be well positioned to timely adapt to the current as well as to the future anticipated global viral challenges, once genetic and metabolic pathways are established.“

-Stephen Panebianco, MD. Chief Medical Officer