Dr. Boris Zaslavsky, Co-founder of Cleveland Diagnostics, Receives Prestigious Award for Scientific Advancements

By Arnon Chait, PhD, MBA
Chief Executive Officer, Cleveland Diagnostics

Every so often the universe smiles at you to let you know you’re on the right track. This occurred recently for all of us at Cleveland Diagnostics when our co-founder and chief scientific officer, Dr. Boris Zaslavsky, received the prestigious Per-Åke Albertsson Award for Separation Science at the Biopartitioning & Purification Conference 2022 in Aveiro, Portugal.

To say we are all proud of Dr. Zaslavsky—Boris—is an understatement. The Albertsson Award honors the best of the best in separation science. It recognizes scientists who have made exceptional contributions in the development of novel implementations of separation science and technology, with particular emphasis on industrial applications.

In receiving the Albertsson Award, Boris has been recognized for his own contributions advancing this field. Even more, it shows the profound respect the world of science has for his championing of the novel separation technology known as aqueous two-phase partitioning (ATPS) and his work advancing its applications in the world of medicine.

ATPS is the versatile technology that underlies Cleveland Diagnostics’ testing platform, and we are fortunate to have the foremost authority on ATPS leading its development. Boris literally wrote the book on ATPS, authoring the definitive text in the ATPS field, Aqueous Two-Phase Partitioning: Physical Chemistry and Bioanalytical Applications. He has also authored more than 140 publications and co-invented multiple patents.

Boris is a bioanalytical chemist by trade, with more than 30 years’ experience in scientific and technical innovation, including at the Russian Academy of Science, where he earned his Doctor of Science degree. Following his studies, Boris emigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 1980s to the United States, where he continued to advance separation science and technology at Cornell Medical College and at Argonne National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.

In 2013, Boris joined me in cofounding Cleveland Diagnostics, with a mission to help physicians and their patients detect cancer early, when it is most treatable and survivable. We recognized the potential for ATPS to uniquely focus on detecting types of protein biomarkers that are directly related to disease.

That potential became reality when Boris and team developed our Solvent Interaction Analysis™ (SIA) technology, which investigates protein biomarkers at the structural level as opposed to overall biomarker concentration in blood. This provides better and more direct insights regarding the protein origin on the cellular level, thus improving test specificity to the underlying disease process. Our first commercial test, IsoPSA for prostate cancer, offers specific two to three times that of standard PSA tests, providing excellent accuracy to help rule out risk of high-grade cancer and the need for a prostate biopsy.

The platform’s ingenuity lies in its simplicity and universality, which enable highly efficacious liquid biopsy diagnostics tests that are also lab-friendly and affordable for a variety of diseases. Its promise, and the promise of Boris’s scientific leadership, lies in the rich pipeline of tests like IsoPSA that will advance diagnostics for life’s most challenging diseases, including cancer.

We are indeed fortunate to have Boris leading the development of the science underlying our innovative testing technology. It is fair to say that we would not have ATPS as we know it, and novel tests such as IsoPSA Test would not exist, if not for Dr. Boris Zaslavsky.