CanSil Diagnostics is a new venture spun out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They are currently looking for physicians with backgrounds in oncology and pathology to help develop our diagnostic tests and take them to market, or to serve as advisors or mentors.
CanSil Diagnostics is giving oncologists more options to treat and cure patients through early detection of various cancers. They are researching and developing diagnostic tests that can find a single diseased cell out of millions. CanSil is taking a simple, new, and logical approach to detecting cancerous cells.
Identifying the right combination of genetic mutations that are indicative of cancer is hugely complex. These mutations, and more importantly, their clinical relevance, change from person to person and cancer to cancer. Still, this is exactly what companies in the field of molecular diagnostics are trying to do. Other companies trying to make sense of these mutations and cancer pathways are having enormous difficulty finding diagnostic tests that provide the information oncologists need to make treatment decisions.
CanSil is taking the simple yet subtle approach of looking for the changes of cells that are actually cancerous instead of trying to predict if or when this might happen based on complicated, unreliable mutations. This is done by measuring the softness of cells. Much like a fresh tomato left to slowly rot, cells becoming metastatic begin to soften. This will later allow them to squeeze through tissue, enter the bloodstream, and spread to other areas of the body. Cancerous cells can therefore be detected by identifying cells that are unusually soft.
CanSil Diagnostics can locate a single cancerous cell by measuring the softness of thousands of cells individually using microscopic probes as seen above.
Although this phenomenon has been known for nearly a decade, CanSil is the first to have patent protected technology that can take these measurements accurately and quickly enough to produce a clinically viable cancer diagnostic test.
If you are an oncologist or pathologist interested in serving as an advisor or mentor, please contact Paulius Elvikis, Founder, at paulius at cansildiagnostics.com.
