Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Scientist behind easier, cheaper COVID test partners with Wynn in hometown venture

Premsrirut

Prem Premsrirut, who grew up in Las Vegas, founded Mirimus Inc., which is positioning itself to be a leader in pool testing for COVID-19 using saliva samples.

Prem Premsrirut’s dissertation was a must-see.

Her brother Rutt, a real estate investor, admits he had no idea what she was talking about in her presentation, the capstone of her doctorate in cancer genetics from Stony Brook University in New York.

Once a little girl from Las Vegas who was a straight-A student and good at everything she tried, from gymnastics to the saxophone, Premsrirut had refined a process for genetically engineering mice for cancer research. She whittled it from two years to a matter of weeks.

“All her classmates were running over to her to watch her presentation and they were excited,” Rutt Premsrirut said. “Just seeing the reaction of all her classmates, I knew she was at a different level.”

The efficiency with which his sister engineered mice showed itself last year when Prem Premsrirut’s biotech startup Mirimus Labs — it’s been in business since 2010 but all biotech firms are startups until they make it big, she joked — entered uncharted territory in the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mirimus, from its economical 2,000-square-foot headquarters in Brooklyn, is positioning itself to be a leader in pool testing for COVID-19 using saliva samples, a method that Premsrirut wants to use to reopen schools and, by extension, all of normal society.

She’s setting up partnerships in Atlanta, Boston, the San Diego area, and the Wynn resort on the Strip in her hometown.

“I definitely want to give back to a community that’s given me a lot as well as my family,” Premsrirut said.

Schools and economies nationwide will benefit from the inexpensive mass testing model that Premsrirut and her team, in collaboration with colleagues around the world, set out to make in the pandemic’s early days — when nasal swab tests cost $150 each, were hard to find, and required components then in short supply and human capital that throttled the process so much as to render the results nearly useless.

The pool tests combine polymerase chain reaction testing — the gold standard for detecting genetic material, such as in a virus — but of saliva self-collected painlessly and intuitively, not of the cells scraped from the nasopharyngeal passage. That’s the uncomfortable deep-nasal swab that people still line up to get done, and the standby for testing for respiratory infections, but which Premsrirut said would be a hard sell as a repetitive testing method, especially for children too young to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

“Pretty much everybody can spit in a tube,” she said.

And, as central to her goal, each test costs less than $15.

Pool testing goes on the idea that most results will be negative, and works like this: Samples from several specimens, say 10 saliva tubes, are combined into one tube that is tested as any individual specimen would be.

If the batch tests negative, that’s 10 results for the price and time of one.

If it hits positive, all 10 of the samples are run individually to find the infected specimen.

Pool testing is common in testing for HIV, hepatitis and genetic diseases in blood. Scientists applied the principle to saliva as COVID-19 raged last year: Rutgers and Yale universities received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for their saliva-based tests, and Japanese researchers released the results of a study last fall that showed mass screening of saliva was as effective as using the uncomfortable, time-consuming nasal swabs.

THE BLUEPRINT

Premsrirut, 40, is a first-generation American who saw firsthand the value of advanced education, power of medicine and opportunity through her Thai immigrant parents. Her father was an economics professor who taught at UNLV and her mother a pediatrician and lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force; Premsrirut, the youngest of four, was born at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The family came to Las Vegas in 1984 when her mother was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, and Clark County had fewer than half a million people. They stayed.

“We’ve definitely grown with Vegas,” Premsrirut said.

Premsrirut is the only member of her immediate family not living in Las Vegas, having left after graduating from Green Valley High School, but she considers the area home.

Doris French Elementary. Cannon Junior High School. Green Valley High. Then UC Berkeley for undergrad and Stony Brook University for the Ph.D. and a medical degree.

When New York went into lockdown last spring, her youngest child, Ivan, suffered under distance learning. He threw his laptop around in frustration, and Premsrirut couldn’t give him the help he needed because she was working.

Knowing that even a hybrid model wouldn’t work for her two children, she and the children’s father agreed to relocate Ivan, now 7, and Anya, 9, to live with her parents in Las Vegas, where they can attend in-person classes at a private school.

“There’s no way I could do any of this had my family not stepped up and said, ‘We’ll take care of the children. You go do what needs to be done,” Premsrirut said.

Premsrirut said she didn’t know she wanted to work in research instead of direct patient care until she entered a laboratory after her undergraduate studies. She knows this will still impact people, and their livelihoods.

Mirimus’ genetic editing and engineering work put it on the map in studying human disease. The company, which went from about 25 employees pre-COVID to about 100 now, still does this, along with the COVID-19 pool testing.

Without much room in their headquarters, Mirimus decided to, rather than give their partners a fish, teach them how to fish. Mirimus provides the blueprint and training for other labs, established or built new, to pool test saliva as regularly as once or twice a week to keep schools open.

Schools are the focus. Premsrirut figures the corporations will come along and subsidize the costs for schools.

The process is always being refined. In the early days, they designed a gadget to help with automation by clustering specimen tubes together like a six-pack of soda to insert into testing racks.

“When you’re faced with problems and you’ve got to overcome them quickly, and every little bit of time and money and everything matters, you will persevere when you can find solutions.”

Brother Rutt, who keeps his niece and nephew a few days a week, said his sister’s solution is “innovative, transformative and logical. It’s common sense.”

“That’s why it’s important, because it’s common sense,” he said. “It’s mass testing, repetitive testing. It has proven to work in other countries, other states.”

As when she unveiled her cutting-edge mouse engineering, he said he didn’t initially understand her pool testing breakthrough.

“But I knew she knew what she was doing,” he said.