The first multi-cancer liquid biopsy test for detection of early-stage cancer and minimal residual disease from a blood draw
With over 10M deaths and an annual cost of €199B, cancer poses an immense burden on individuals, healthcare, and society. To reduce cancer deaths, improve patients’ quality of life, and lower the economic cost, both early detection and treatment are key. Current methods for early cancer screening and minimal residual disease (MRD) testing include inconvenient and costly procedures such as mammograms, Pap smears, colonoscopies. Unfortunately, for the majority of cancers, no early detection method exists. Blood-based tests offer an attractive opportunity and receive major interest from the industry. Yet, no FDA-approved test for blood-based early cancer detection and MRD testing exists. The novel tests in development, focus on circulating tumor DNA detection. This is limited by low sensitivity, thus lacking clinical validity and utility.

The breakthrough CellMate® innovation, fast-tracked to market entry in this FTI project, will fundamentally transform the standard of care for cancer detection. Incorporating the advanced IsoPic™ universal circulating tumor cell capturing, staining technology, and AI-powered bioinformatics workflow, CellMate® detects multiple types of early-stage cancer and MRD with 90% sensitivity. Additionally, the AI-driven decision support functionality enables informed clinical decisions, including personalized treatment suggestions. Based on only a single blood draw, the molecular details of the cancer are provided in 4 days. Technology partners iCellate and QIAGEN (global leader in bioinformatic analysis) team-up with UKSH, a leading oncology institute in Europe. Together we demonstrate CellMate®’s clinical and economic value in a study with breast, ovarian, and pancreatic patients. The extensive network of our consortium ensures a broad outreach to patients, clinicians, healthcare organizations. CellMate® benefits from a multi-billion-euro (>€2.2B) market opportunity that is growing with the cancer screening market rising to ~9B by 2030.