A Journey of Faith, Love and Science: Breakthrough Longevity Tech Company Launches New Phase of Commercialization to Accelerate Drug Development
Dr. Codi Gharagouzloo, an MRI physicist, and his wife, New York attorney Valerie Gharagouzloo, created Imaginostics to advance medical breakthroughs for uncurable diseases with their imaging biomarkers.
Imaginostics, a promising startup company founded in 2018, is bringing to market a revolutionary longevity technology for early detection of diseases decades in advance through MRIs. The company’s technology uses a new way to acquire data from existing MRI scanners and hardware, improving MRIs by 10x and enabling new physiological measurements that describe the cellular vascular environment. This represents a potential breakthrough for the early detection of many age-related diseases, and in particular Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia.
Imaginostics was founded by Dr. Codi and Valerie Gharagouzloo, a French American couple who met in Valerie’s native France in 2007, were married in 2010, and have two children. Dr. Gharagouzloo invented and developed the breakthrough quantitative imaging technology during his Ph.D. in bioengineering at Northeastern University and postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Valerie inspired Codi to launch his startup to bring his extraordinary tech from bench to bedside.
“At the heart of the technology is quantum physics, where we overcome the qualitative limitations of magnetic susceptibility using ultra-short measurement times 1,000x earlier than standard MRIs. As a bonus, the tech is compatible with an iron supplement for contrast and doesn’t require toxic gadolinium,” Codi said. “From there, we can quantify microvascular density, function, and leakage.”
“Alzheimer’s disease is like a black box from the day you’re born until the day you develop symptoms,” Codi added. “We’ve known that blood vessels are abnormal, but current technologies can’t quantify it at the individual level.
“There are lots of exciting drugs in development that could not only cure Alzheimer’s but extend a healthy lifespan. We are just one piece of the puzzle: quantitative imaging biomarkers of aging for fast and high-throughput testing.”
In 2022, the company raised $1.35 million in grants, including nearly $1 million from an NIH-NIA SBIR Grant for Clinical Validation for Novel MRI Biomarkers in screening and quantification of mild cognitive impairment, boosted by an investment by the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation of $725,000. Imaginostics is fundraising another $2.2 million to consolidate the team at Lake Nona Medical City in Orlando and launch its first phase of commercialization for accelerating drug development. The company expects first sales to pharmaceutical companies in 2024, and partners with clinical research organizations.
“We are still living in the stone age with current MRIs and there haven’t been any precision advancements for decades,” Codi said. “For the first time, Imaginostics can visualize the vasculature throughout the whole body, assay health and disease, stratify patient populations, and assess drug efficacy at the individual level.”
Imaginostics is creating the next generation of precision medicine diagnostic tools for clinicians and drug developers to transform personalized healthcare, accelerate drug development and fight aging.
“Preventive medical care is better than curative care. We want to transform lives by empowering people to take control of their own health and well-being,” Valerie said.
For more information, visit https://imaginostics.com