The core of the TheraMe! strength is its unique technology
The main problem in cancer therapy is that every patient and every tumor is different and reacts differently to drugs. Even worse, tumor cells rapidly change their response to drugs over time and develop resistances. What is needed is a system allowing to test which drug or drug combination works best on the tumor cells of a given patient at a given point in time. This is exactly the concept of TheraMe! We use microfluidic technology (a kind of miniaturized laboratory on a chip) to determine the best therapy options directly on live tumor samples from patients.
Our device
The TheraMe! MD-100™ is easy to use and compact
What makes us unique
By using proprietary microfluidic technology we can run many drug tests directly on the tumor cells from patient biopsies or tumor resections. Instead of using conventional test tubes or microtiter plates, which require more cells for drug screens than what can be obtained from a patient, we perform drug tests in microscopic droplets inside microfluidic systems. Our approach has manifold advantages over existing technology:
High throughput, independent of biomarker availability
In contrast to companion diagnostic tests we cannot only test the response to individual drugs, but rather to hundreds of treatment options in a single screen. Furthermore, we are fully target agnostic, meaning we do not need any prior knowledge on biomarkers of a given tumor and we provide direct evidence for drug response, not just probabilities.
Affordability and rapid turnover
Using our system, the best therapy option for each patient can be determined within 24h for functional readout and 5 working days for transcriptomic readout, which is similar to routine diagnostic tests and fully compatible with clinical needs and decision making.
Pre-therapy analysis
In contrast to counting circulating tumor cells (CTCs) for personalized therapy purposes, we provide data on drug response even before the therapy starts and for hundreds of possible drug treatments simultaneously. This way patients do not have to undergo painful therapies that later on turn out to be inefficient.
