Spatial biology specialist Lunaphore (Tolochenaz, Switzerland) recently announced a collaboration with the pathology department at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop an in vitro diagnostic (IVD) that assesses the sensitivity of solid tumors to poly-ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors.
“Lunaphore is based on a technology that I developed for my Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne,” said Ata Tuna Ciftlik, the company’s CEO. When earning his doctorate in biomedical microsystems from 2008 to 2013, there was “no talk of spatial biology,” he added. “The goal was to extract spatial multiomic data from tumors.”
Inspired by next-generation sequencing (NGS), which combines microfluidics and optics, Lunaphore created a chip technology to extract spatial proteomic and genomic data from tumors while transforming simple assays into multiplex spatial biology.