This Pitt medical student wants to make tests for cerebral aneurysms simpler and more effective

Adi Mittal was ready to click the button. He and his collaborator Kamil Nowicki were sitting on an important finding and were about to submit it to a major neurosurgery conference. They knew it would make a splash, maybe even win an award. But they hesitated.

“And then prior to clicking ‘submit,’ Kamil says, ‘Wait. I think this could lead to an innovation,” Mittal described. “So we deleted the draft and started to go down the invention disclosure pathway at Pitt.”

That decision was Mittal’s first step down an unfamiliar road — away from the the abstracts and papers of academia and toward the funding rounds and FDA approval pathways of a medical technology startup. It’s a lot to balance as a fourth-year medical student at Pitt, but he has plenty of inspiration.

“Fortunately, there are a lot of med students here who are interested in innovation and entrepreneurship,” he said. “So I try to follow in their footsteps and learn from them.”

How a startup starts up

Mittal got an earlier start in research than most. In ninth grade, he was already studying sickle cell disease and vascular medicine, which he continued as a Pitt undergrad. After arriving at medical school, he took an interest in cerebral aneurysms, the potentially deadly condition of bulging blood vessels in the brain.

Despite their prevalence — aneurysms afflict up to one in 20 people in the general population, according to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation — there aren’t many researchers studying them, in part because of how difficult it is to work with the mouse model that researchers use to mimic the condition in humans. That’s translated to lots of uncertainty for patients, too.

“It’s just a lot of work for patients to get diagnosed,” Mittal said. “It’s invasive, it’s toxic, it’s very expensive.”

When Mittal met Nowicki, then a neurosurgery resident at UPMC, they decided to tackle that problem. When they analyzed blood samples their advisor had in the freezer, they found key differences in which inflammation-linked molecules appeared in the blood of those who had cerebral aneurysms and those who didn’t.

That was the discovery they almost submitted to the conference — and the nugget that would become their startup, Astria Biosciences, which is focused on a blood test to detect cerebral aneurysms that the team calls CAT-7.

Mittal and Nowicki found themselves at the base of a steep learning curve, and sought support from Pitt’s Innovation Institute, part of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, where staff members like Dan Broderick, Tony Torres and Paul Petrovich helped the duo navigate the world of business and connect with other budding entrepreneurs.

“That’s the only way Astria was possible,” Mittal said. “It was so clear how little we knew, and I was really nervous. They’ve stuck with us since the beginning.”

Along the way, Mittal won accolade after accolade for his work, including taking second place in the Big Idea Competition and first place at the 2023 Collegiate Inventors Competition, the Michael G. Wells Student Healthcare Competition and the 2024 UpPrize Social innovation Challenge.

To cap it all off, last week Mittal was named Student Innovator of the Year by the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.