SAN DIEGO– Epic Sciences, Inc. today announced it has entered into an exclusive license and collaboration agreement with Dr. Peter Kuhn and the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. Dr. Kuhn is a founding member of the USC Michelson Center and leads USC’s Convergent Science Institute in Cancer (CSI-Cancer). The collaboration will improve Epic’s platform and enable more precise characterization of rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which Epic is developing into liquid-biopsy diagnostics used for characterizing a patient’s cancer to guide treatment decisions.
Epic is a global leader in the identification and characterization of CTCs. Epic’s platform, originally licensed from Dr. Kuhn’s laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, uses state-of-the-art Carl Zeiss optics coupled with AI-trained machine-vision algorithms to analyze blood treated with fluorescent antibodies. Epic’s platform provides unsurpassed sensitivity with the ability to detect one rare cell in ten million nucleated cells. Today Epic’s platform is used to make treatment decisions for patients with advanced prostate cancer marketed by Exact Sciences and is used in over 100 ongoing clinical trials of cancer therapeutics conducted by Epic’s corporate and academic research partners.
The Epic and USC Michelson partnership will give Epic exclusive access to the next generation, comprehensive liquid biopsy from Dr. Kuhn’s laboratory and expand Epic’s platform to provide in-depth characterization of both the cell-free fractions and CTCs in the liquid biopsy using genomic, proteomic and AI-based morphological tools, all from a single blood draw.
Rick Wenstrup, Chief Medical Officer of Epic Sciences, focused on the application of Epic’s enhanced platform in the monitoring of minimal residual disease (MRD) in cancer, “The ability to identify circulating neoplastic cells and cells from the tumor microenvironment, provides additional information critical to understanding the current state of a patient’s disease and offers the ability to monitor cancer status, and response to a specific therapy.”
Epic plans to offer this next-generation CTC technology as part of its suite of Comprehensive Cancer Profiling™ technologies, that includes Epic’s ctDNA capabilities as a comprehensive solution designed to meet the growing needs of clinicians for precision medicine diagnostic tests and for pharmaceutical partners as they seek to develop life-changing therapies.
“We are excited about this collaboration with Epic Sciences intended to accelerate our goals towards improved cancer patient outcomes,” said Dr. Kuhn, adding that “It also advances Epic Sciences further towards a data science company.”
