Company with roots at JYU receives €2.5 million from the European Innovation Council – BiopSense develops new ways to improve cancer therapy
With this funding, EIC supports the transfer of medical technology from lab environment into practical solutions and promotes the development of the business model towards future commercialisation of the innovation.
BiopSense develops solutions for the monitoring of cancer using liquid biopsy, for example, blood samples.
“While the selection of applicable drugs is increasing, more frequent controls help oncologists to react more quickly if the response to medication is unsatisfactory or if the patient has developed drug resistance, says Professor Marja Tiirola, a scientific advisor of BiopSense. “Frequent control also helps define right therapy for the patient more quickly.”
“There are excellent new drugs for cancer, but they are often very expensive and their effect may vary between individuals,” says BiopSense’s Medical Director Juha Kononen, a chief medical officer at Docrates. “For this reason, it is important to find the right medication to the right patient as soon as possible.”
“Employing the technology developed at BiopSense, liquid biopsy may become an effective way to improve the quality of cancer therapies with lower costs,” Tiirola describes.
BiopSense is developing a fully automated extraction and transfer cartridge of blood-based biomarkers (DNA, RNA, cells, proteins). This enables more frequent sample acquisition and analysis irrespective of the laboratory workforce available. The technology also opens possibilities for wider international business in terms of liquid biopsy services.
Patents and business arising from basic research
Marja Tiirola’s research is a good example of how basic research can lead to practical applications. Tiirola’s research team at the Ģֱ is studying, among others, environmental microbiology and oncological diagnostics. The operational field is broad, but the methodology – DNA technology – is common to different projects.
“Tiirola’s research team has been an active customer of the University’s Innovation Services,” says Innovation Advisor Laura Aineslahti. “We have managed to get patents for the team’s research-based inventions. Taking inventions into practice requires funding, because their functioning needs to be validated. In this case, essential funding was linked first to Tiirola’s ERC project and its follower, the ERC Proof of Concept project.”
One of the early-stage investors in BiopSense is the Ģֱ’s investment company Unifund, which helped to transfer the technology developed by Tiirola’s research team to the company. The Startup Factory has contributed to the operational development, supporting the commercialisation process of BiopSense’s technology through the Startup Factory’s incubator services.
Further information:
Marja Tiirola, 044 085 8609, marja.tiirola@biopsense.com
Laura Aineslahti, 050 308 5256, laura.aineslahti@jyu.fi
List of the recipients of funding: