HOUSTON (June 2, 2011) --- ApoCell, Inc. announced today that it has completed the first prototype to commercialize a revolutionary technology that improves the detection of more types of cancer cells circulating in the blood, including rare cell types that have previously gone undetected. Invented by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center's Laboratory of Diagnostic Microsystems and exclusively licensed to ApoCell, a leader in biomarker analysis, the technology also enables the capture of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in a live and viable state, enabling post-detection testing and culturing.

Combined with the analytical power of modern cell analysis technology, ApoCell's advanced CTC detection technology is expected to improve the diagnosis and treatment of all cancer patients by providing relatively painless, minimally invasive access to patients' cancer cells from a blood sample. In addition, ApoCell's technology can detect very low concentrations of target cellular material, with the goal of enabling clinicians to discover hard-to-detect cancers at a very early stage.

For almost 150 years, scientists have known that CTCs can be found in the blood of cancer patients. Some believe that these circulating cancer cells cause metastasis, the transmission of a cancer from one location to another in the body. CTCs are very rare, less than 10 cells in one milliliter (ml) of blood, making their detection and analysis very difficult by current methods. The ApoCell technology is very sensitive in selecting these circulating cancer cells because it is based on cell morphology ---fundamental differences in form and structure between healthy cells and cancer cells. By exposing the patient's blood sample to a low level electrical field of varying frequencies, ApoCell's technology enables the separation of cancer cells, based on their inherently different properties, from all other cells. This phenomenon is called dielectrophoresis field flow fractionation or DEP-FFF.
The ApoCell product development group has created the first commercial version of a DEP-FFF instrument for clinical research testing. Called ApoStream™, beta versions are currently being manufactured and are expected to be introduced in the field later this year.

"ApoStream™ is truly revolutionary in the detection of CTCs for several reasons," said ApoCell President & CEO Darren Davis, Ph.D. "First, it permits the isolation of cancer cells from all types of cancer including lung, prostate, melanoma, breast, pancreatic, liver, glioblastoma and other rare forms. In addition, because the cancer cells extracted by our method are alive and viable, it allows for many laboratory tests such as protein biomarker analysis, mutation detection and culturing of these rare cells for in vitro drug testing to accelerate the drug development process."

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