Delee has launched a new crowdfunding campaign to raise $5 million USD through StartEngine to boost its breakthrough technology for early cancer detection and treatment monitoring. This campaign is the continuation of efforts from last year’s round, where the company crowdfunded $1.07 million USD to develop Cytocatch™, a platform that detects, isolates and analyzes circulating tumor cells (CTCs). The technology is currently being clinically validated for its use in prostate and breast cancer, to later expand it to lung and colorectal cancer, mainly because, in 2020 alone, these four types of cancer account for over 40% of the new cancer cases registered worldwide.
CTCs are cancerous cells shed from a tumor, flowing in the patient’s bloodstream. The isolation and analysis of these cells could enable a broad range of cancer-related clinical applications. One of said applications is early cancer detection, which is key because the survival rate in most types of cancer is directly related to the stage at which tumors are detected. The second clinical application is monitoring the applied treatments’ effectiveness, which will allow the optimization of individual therapies throughout the course of the disease by providing physicians with the necessary information to administer the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.
However, the isolation of these malignant cells from blood represents a major technological challenge due to their heterogeneity and extremely low numbers in comparison to blood cells; on average, you can find around 40.5 billion cells in 7.5 mL of blood, while a cancer patient may have between 1 and 1000 CTCs in the same volume.
Delee’s patent pending technology is composed of the CytoCatch™ isolation platform, which automatically performs the necessary steps to prepare and process a blood sample, capturing the CTCs contained in it, and the CytoCatch™ imaging system, which possesses special routines and machine learning algorithms to analyze the captured cells based on their morphology and the expression of specific markers. The fact that all these processes are fully automated increases the reliability and reproducibility of the assay by preventing human errors and cell loss due to manual steps. Furthermore, the collected cells are compatible with traditional molecular biology techniques and next generation sequencing technologies enabling the performance of molecular analyses to assess the genetic characteristics of the captured CTCs.
Delee is backed by Y Combinator and StartX. To date the company has secured $2.4 million in funding, and has pre-orders worth a potential value of over $2.5 million USD. The funds from this round will be used to run a clinical study with samples from patients with prostate and breast cancer in order to clinically validate the technology, to then start the commercialization of said technology for research centers and pharmaceutical companies as a research use only platform. Then, the company will begin the process to get the FDA clearance for the commercialization of the machine as an in vitro diagnostic medical device for its use in hospitals and laboratories.
In 2019, the CTC market was valued at $8.4 billion USD, and it is expected to reach an $18.3 billion USD valuation by 2027. This growth is mainly driven by the increase in the number of cancer cases that will occur in the upcoming years.
You can now be part of this venture by investing in Delee through its StartEngine crowdfunding campaign.
