Capio Biosciences, an early stage biotechnology startup company developing a biopsy-free technology for capturing Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) and other targets of interest, was awarded a Phase I grant effective August 1, 2018 by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number R43CA232924. The technology, called CapioCyte™ offers up to 150-fold capture efficiency compared to conventional antibody-based methods by utilizing a biomimetic combination of E-selectin-induced cell rolling and dendrimer mediated multivalent binding. This Phase I grant will be used to optimize the CapioCyte™ chip design utilizing different combinations of capture agents and to validate the optimized prototype chip using blood samples from cancer patients receiving immunotherapy. This project will be conducted in collaboration with Seungpyo Hong PhD (UW, Madison WI) and Andrew Wang MD (UNC, Chapel Hill NC) who have developed the CapioCyte™ technology together. The goal is to develop a highly sensitive device for capturing CTCs as predictive biomarker for treatment response to immunotherapy.
Cancer immunotherapy, the utilization of the patients’ own immune system to treat cancer, has emerged as a powerful new strategy in cancer treatment. An unmet need in cancer immunotherapy treatment has been the lack of a predicative biomarker for treatment response. CapioCyte™ aims to address this challenge as a predicative biomarker for cancer immunotherapy therapy using circulating tumor cell capture technology, which has the potential to positively impact millions of cancer patients.
