Wilfrido Mojica
Chief Technology Officer at Virchow Medical, Inc.
Buffalo, New York, United States
About Wilfrido Mojica
Wilfrido Mojica is Chief Technology Officer at Virchow Medical, Inc. Location: Buffalo, New York, United States.
My interest lay in identifying improvements in clinical specimen procurement and processing that enable the derivation of bioinformatic data beyond traditional morphologic assessment. This involves creating material resources for emerging diagnostic and therapeutic related technologies, the development of new tools that may facilitate sample processing, and the testing of the feasibility of adopting these modifications in the clinical setting. With the realization that clinical biospecimens are an invaluable resource to patient care, the overall goal is to collaborate using methodologies that will lead to the early detection of certain tumors, provide high quality substrates from clinical biospecimens for in-depth characterization, and provide a venue to their overall incorporation in laboratory diagnostics. The tools described above include the ”Crow’s Nest”, which is intended to solve multiple problems related to specimen insufficiency, nucleic acid integrity, preservation and accessibility, tissue management compliance issues, and the need for simplicity in specimen acquisition from small core needle biopsies. It is currently being tested at several separate hospital systems and institutions for molecular concordance, quality metrics, and overall workflow to identify potential barriers towards general adoption, with early results extremely promising. Our second device in development, the Multi-Omic Octagonal Scavenger (MOOS), is designed to function as a version of the Crow’s Nest for larger tissue specimens. It is being initially tested on early bladder cancer with the intent to prove this cancer can provide the basis for a multi-pronged interrogation for early detection and therapy guidance through usage of unfixed diagnostic tumor material to identify biomarkers characteristic of these tumor cells in the form of exosomes and metabolomics, growth of organoids for multidrug sensitivity testing, and molecular profiling for earlier and possibly more definitive therapy than current treatments. A third device, called the “Cell Wrangler” is still in the development phase and is intended to provide bifunctionality to rapid assessment of adequacy by recovering those same cells for molecular analysis.
Skills
Additional experience
Chief of Pathology
Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center
Started January 2021
Education
- M.D., St. Louis University School of Medicine
- M.S., Georgetown University