NEW YORK — Lunaphore Technologies said on Thursday that it has partnered with the University of Bern to study tumor budding in colorectal cancer.
The partners will use Lunaphore's Comet immunostaining platform to study colorectal cancer tumor buds, which the company said are defined as a single tumor cell or a cluster of up to four cells that are lying at the invasive front of the primary tumor site and can be seen streaming through the stroma and entering vessels.
The platform, which combines a high-throughput stainer and a fluorescent microscope, will enable multiplexed immunostaining of tumor buds and the surrounding microenvironment in cancer tissue sections, according to Tolochenaz, Switzerland-based Lunaphore.
"We believe that [tumor buds] are a key component in the process of tumor dissemination and metastasis," Inti Zlobec, director of the translational research unit at the University of Bern's Institute of Pathology, said in a statement. "This project will be crucial to further our understanding of their biology and to extract novel prognostic factors from the tumor microenvironment."
The collaboration is being funded with a grant from the Swiss Innovation Agency.
In early 2020, Lunaphore raised about $2.1 million in Series C2 financing.