CEAMS CASE STUDY CHROMITION

Chromition leveraged CEAMS’s industry network to access R&D facilities and secure essential funding to advance its LuminspheresTM technology for healthcare diagnostic applications.

1.     The Challenge

 Chromition was incorporated in 2014 by University of Manchester academics Mark McCairn and Michael Turner to help reduce the economic cost of cancer to healthcare providers. Their propriety technology, LuminspheresTM are ultra bright multicoloured fluorescent nanoparticles that can be used in immunofluorescent and CRISPR based bioimaging and diagnostics to detect disease biomarkers in tissue and liquid biopsies. This allows them to explore a wide range of healthcare diagnostic applications.

Chromition needed to develop a data pack to benchmark LuminspheresTM against other fluorescent materials. This required access to a flow cytometry facility to evaluate LuminspheresTM under the same conditions as commercial fluorophores to demonstrate their superiorbrightness and sensitivity of detection. Chromition wanted to collaborate with CEAMS as a benchmarking exercise, to enhance their product credibility and advance conversations with industry.

2.    The Solution

As a Manchester-based business, CEAMS activated its local partner network to assist Chromition with engaging in industry discussions. CEAMS’s partners from the Henry Royce Institute played a crucial role in helping Chromition develop a proposal to utilise facilities and expertise at the University of Manchester, including techniques such as flow cytometry.

With support from CEAMS, Chromition have been able to gain access to expertise and essential equipment. This allowed them to undertake testing that was instrumental in securing funding from Innovate UK for an ongoing project on immunofluorescence for early breast cancer diagnosis.

3.    The Impact

The data pack produced helped Chromition to effectively present its technology to industry stakeholders, customers, and venture capital investors, ultimately helping the business to become more competitive and enable it to scale in the healthcare industry.

Over the next 2.5 years, the funding secured for the breast cancer diagnosis project will be used to validate Chromition’s technology and lead to a clinical trial. A follow-on project will be testing how LuminspheresTM can be used to detect a single cancer cell from a syringe of blood – a less invasive and early detection method for diagnosing cancer compared to tissue biopsy.

In the UK, there are around 55,500 new breast cancer cases every year. The testing conducted by CEAMS application scientists provided the support that enabled Chromition to advance their technology, with the potential to significantly help the early detection of thousands of cancer cases. This could eventually be applied in routine blood tests.

The team aims to develop their platform technology beyond healthcare with applications in authentication, reservoir tracers and printed electronics.