Vita-Tech™ Overview

Today, the blood testing market using Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) has emerged as one of the hottest fields in cancer diagnosis. Vitatex´ technology enables an increase of cancer detection sensitivity 10 times greater than current technologies and it offers several advantages:

(1) it can detect live cancer cells in blood which indicate metastasis,

(2) viable CTCs captured by our technology can be either examined directly by pathologists in the clinic or counted by flow cytometry and/or PCR machines, a tool readily available in clinical laboratories, and

(3) viable CTCs captured by our technology can be cultured for further clinical and research uses.

Metastasis, the spread of cancer from the primary tumor to circulation and other parts of the body (Figure 1), remains a prominent problem in the search for a cure for cancer. Vitatex was founded to create the next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatments targeted at metastasis.

Figure 1. Some tumor cells emerge from the primary site into circulation and other organ sites, a process called metastasis. Early detection of metastasis is the hallmark of future cancer detection and treatment.

The core of our platform technology is based on the design for novel devices employing a cell adhesion matrix (CAM, a porous layer of extracellular matrix polymer coated with blood-borne adhesion molecules) that mimics the interstitial microenvironment, in which tumor cells are invading from primary site (see Figure 1, yellow paths of emerging tumor cells). For cancer detection, we have used the cell adhesion matrix (CAM) technology to achieve two goals: enrichment and discrimination of viable circulating tumor cells from non-viable tumor cells and the vastly greater number of normal cells in blood.

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