A deep understanding of stem cell biology is helping Bay Area startup OncoCyte build out a new suite of cancer diagnostics.
The company just raised $3.3 million from two private investors; it’s majority owned, however, by the publicly traded stem cell umbrella company BioTime.
The company is developing three genetic tests – blood tests for breast cancer and lung cancer, and a urine-based test for bladder cancer. They haven’t yet hit the market, but are in large clinical studies.
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OncoCyte actually draws its diagnostic capability from the kind of stem cell research going on at BioTime – because the company itself pivoted away from embryonic stem cell-based cancer therapeutics and into the diagnostics space.
Several genes associated with embryonic stem cell growth are reactivated, abnormally, by cancer cells, Wagner said. The markers in OncoCyte’s tests look for telomerase genes found typically in stem cells.
“Cancer cells find these genes and use them because they can divide forever,” Wagner said. “So we went on a hunt for similar genes – those that are overexpressed in cancer cells.”
Understanding this gene expression could allow for powerful diagnostic capability. The tests meant to be used in conjunction with current diagnostic approaches, so as to help reduce the false positive rate that’s prevalent, particularly with lung cancer, CEO Joseph Wagner said.
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“We want to place this into the current screening paradigms – not displace anything, but increase the performance of current standards,” he said.
The company’s actually been working on this approach since 2008 – it originated at the Cleveland-based Cell Targeting Inc. before a 2010 BioTime acquisition.
On top of the diagnostics, it’s working on cellular therapeutics for cancer treatment – saying it’s using the “unique biology of vascular endothelial precursor cells.” The idea is to specifically target the development of tumor vasculature in late-stage cancers, sussing out weaknesses and killing the tumor cells.
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