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Friday, November 14, 2008
Lumicell targets leftover cancer cells
By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech
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A group of scientists plan to launch next month Lumicell Diagnostics Inc., a Waltham-based startup that will make a tool to enable surgeons to check an open tumor site for remaining cancer cells after removing a tumor in surgery.
The instrument makes use of a fluid reagent, with a dye, or fluorophore, attached to a long-chain polymer that radiates fluorescent light when coming into contact with a cancer enzyme.
Interim CEO W. David Lee is integrative program officer at MIT and an entrepreneur-in-residence at Waltham-based Kodiak Venture Partners, Lumicell’s sole provider of seed funding. He said the reaction results in the release of tiny “points of light” not visible to the human eye from remaining cancer sites.
Lee said those points of light can be detected with a prototype handheld device made by his company that uses a laser to excite the fluorescent dye, transmitting the findings to a display screen. The device will enter animal trials before the end of the year, according to the company. Its camera has a detection field of five centimeters and is capable of pinpointing light at the cellular level, at less than 20 microns diameter. One possible use is in laparoscopic surgery, the company said, where the fluorescing cancer cells can be more easily seen through a laparoscope, and ideally more completely removed.
Andrey Zarur, a partner with Kodiak, said his firm found no other technology that “distinguishes cancer at a single cell level, whether it has been left behind in the margins (of tumor sites) or not.”
Canada-based IMRIS Inc., a competitor, in 2005 began selling multimillion-dollar intraoperative magnetic imaging systems, or high-field iMRI, to detect residual cancers. IMRIS has so far sold 22 units of its Intra-Operative MR and IMRISneuro devices to hospitals, including the Children’s Hospital Boston.
Studies suggest a high rate of cancer cells get missed in surgery, with double-digit percentages of cancer reoccurrence at sites of surgery. A study reported in 2003 in the journal Cancer Control said of 112 surgical intracranial brain tumor cases, iMRIs gave evidence for surgeons to go back to remove more cancer in 36 percent of cases.
Lumicell’s technology began incubating at Kodiak last year, and Lumicell will seek to license intellectual property rights by year’s end from the institutions that supported the program’s initial development, Zarur said.
The founders include MIT researchers Moungi Bawandi and Linda Griffith, David Kirsch at Duke University, Ralph Weissleder at Massachusetts General Hospital, Lee and senior post-doctoral fellow Jorge Ferrer.
The device could be released in three years at an unspecified price. Lumicell will continue development in that time, honing abilities to use reagents to detect sarcomas — cancers in connective tissue, muscle and bone; and then seeking reagents for markers that reveal the presence of carcinomas in epithelial tissues.
Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer in Portsmouth, N.H.
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