RUBYnanomed was founded in 2018 as a spin-off of INL and aims to bring lab discoveries to the clinical market. RUBYnanomed focusses on the non-invasive monitoring of cancer progression, as cancer is a major cause of death worldwide that caused 9.6 million deaths in 2018, and 90 % of those are due to metastasis.
RUBYnanomed has developed a precise cancer snapshot tool, the RUBYchip™, a microfluidic device for isolating all types of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) from unprocessed whole blood. In this way, RUBYnanomed offers a non-invasive and real-time snapshot of cancer progression to oncologists.
They demonstrated the higher efficiency and sensitivity of our cartridge against the reference CellSearch® equipment for different types of cancer (breast, colorectal, bladder, prostate). They were able to isolate a higher number of CTCs from unprocessed whole blood samples, and showed the potential to provide improved correlation with clinical prognostic information (Scientific Reports, 2019).
Currently, RUBYnanomed is running pre-clinical trials at 8 hospitals for 5 different types of cancer in different countries in Europe. In the short life of this startup, they won several prizes at different accelerators in the UK, Portugal or Germany.
Role in the PERSIST project
RUBY will use the RUBYchip for the isolation of CTCs from a pool of patients of breast and colorectal cancer. These will be the objective markers for the patients included in the study, and highly complementary to the eHelath tools developed by the PERSIST partners. By combining the Big Data tools to be developed at PERSIST, plus the automation software to be developed by GRAD together with the biometric results, CTC counts and phenotypic classification, the project aims to provide a holistic solution to hospitals and clinicians. In this way, RUBY will contribute to the development of the mutimodal sensor network during WP4. More specifically, RUBY will participate in T4.2. to gather data from objective sensor nodes and T4.4. for the design and implementation of software-based sensing netwworks to recognise risk factors.
Furthermore, RUBY will also benefit from the PERSIST consortium as it will boost their industrialisation process, by scaling up the fabrication of the RUBYchip(TM) as well as automate, in collaboration with GRAD, the analysis of the output of the captured CTCs for their counting and phenotypical characterisation.
Learn more about RUBYnanomed:
http://rubynanomed.com/