Project Bright: Liquid Biopsy System
Project Type: Diagnostic Capital Device, Disposable Cartridge Design
Role: Industrial Design Lead, Design Engineer
Duration: 19 Months
By monitoring metastasis through isolation and imaging of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) Bright Medical’s breakthrough liquid biopsy technology would provide a vital advantage in the treatment of cancer patients, empowering oncologists to provide bespoke treatment and react to disease progression in real time.
Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are cells that have shed from a primary tumor and are swept away by the circulatory or lymphatic systems, traveling through the body and forming tumors in other viable tissue and organs.
Isolating or enriching CTCs is challenging due to their low concentration in the massive pool of circulating blood cells (about 1 in 10 billion cells) and physical properties that make them difficult to capture mechanically.
Bright Medical’s chip technology solves these problems, trapping CTCs and selectively staining them using specific antibodies, allowing them to be imaged and analysed special equipment.
Bright Medical’s technology required a multi-hour manual process and a highly trained lab technician to isolate and stain CTCs from blood samples. In order to scale their technology up and unlock greater adoption and impact in clinical pathology labs, several challenges needed to be solved:
Automation
Replace hand-dosed reagents, complicated setup steps and multiple disposable components with a single cartridge and fully automated processing unit that could provide high sample through-put and high repeatability with an intuitive and error-proof workflow
Biohazard Isolation
Isolate the capital system from patient blood sample and spent reagents for safe disposal with no cleaning cycle between runs.
Reagent Management
Manage storage and reconstitution for pre-dosed reagents onboard cartridge for a plug-and-play solution without the need for bulk dispensing.
Error-proof patient information tracking
Seamlessly interface with Lab Information Systems, tracing patient data to samples and processed chips for results reporting, replacing hand-written notes and log books or manually transferred patient labels.
