Project description
Liquid biopsy platform for early characterisation of circulating tumour cells
Early cancer diagnosis enables proper treatment at the earliest possible stage. Liquid biopsy can detect cells, DNA or other cellular or extracellular components that originate from tumours and are found in the blood and other body fluids. This minimally invasive approach shows high diagnostic sensitivity and specificity with enormous potential for early diagnosis and real-time monitoring of cancer. Based on a proprietary technology, the Italian company Tethis developed an automated pre-analytical platform, to be placed at the point of blood collection, that enables comprehensive liquid biopsy in solid tumours. It facilitates a true multi-omics analysis, using all the available analytical techniques and efficiency in the logistics of sample shipment. The EU-funded TETHIS-SBS-CTC project will evaluate the technology's market potential.
Objective
Cancer is one of the most important causes of death worldwide, accounting for 8.8 million deaths. The rate of new cases is expected to rise by 70% in the next 2 decades, posing a huge challenge for the healthcare system. If diagnosed early and treated adequately, many cases would have a high chance of cure. This realization is driving the growth in the cancer diagnostics market. The detection and analysis of Circulating Tumour Cells (CTCs) encloses a huge potential for real-time monitoring of cancer cases. CTCs are considered a “diagnostic tumour marker” since they are the reflection of a metastatic aggression. We at TETHIS have developed a new diagnostic platform to characterize CTCs from liquid biopsy (i.e. blood). The combination of our expertise in nanotechnology and strong biology knowledge have led to the development of a Smart BioSurface (SBS) that creates a perfect environment to immobilize CTCs using a total capture approach. Compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives, our methodology does not require pre-enrichment or selection. Having validated this technology for cancer diagnostics at the pilot stage, this project is conceived to finalise the development and market preparation of this technology, culminating in a diagnostic platform for cellular, proteomic and molecular characterization of CTCs. The platform will have key applications, including diagnostics and monitoring in clinical settings, and drug discovery & therapy development in the pharma/biotech sectors. The Phase 1 of this project is dedicated to run a Feasibility Study that helps us evaluate the project from a technical, commercial and financial standpoint. Once the project is finished, we expect our platform to improve the diagnostic capability in the oncology sector, enabling earlier detection and better management. In turn, it will secure the growth for TETHIS, expecting to gain over €10 million in profits, hire 15 new people and reach a ROI of €2.58 from this project after 5 years.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacydrug discovery
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic health
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- engineering and technologynanotechnology
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncology
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
20143 Milano
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.