InCure, one of the portfolio companies of Hadasit Bio-Holdings, Ltd. (TASE: HDST), has announced promising results of a comparative trial of the blood samples of cancer patients and healthy individuals.
The InCure technology, based on scientific work by Dr. Rachel Bar-Shavit and her team in the Oncology Department at the Hadassah – Hebrew University Hospital in Ein Karem, can be used to develop a diagnostic kit for detecting metastatic cancer by means of a simple blood test, with no need for a biopsy or any other invasive procedure.
The company, which is located within the hospital campus, has access to the serum bank of the hospital’s Oncology Department, by means of Dr. Beatrice Uziely, who heads its clinical division. The oncology patients’ serum bank includes samples with various types and stages of cancer (cancer is classified into four stages, as a function of how advanced it is and how far it has spread in the body).
The diagnostic kit being developed by InCure is based on identification of a peptide (a segment of a protein) that is found in metastatic cancer cells. Because the peptide is not found in the blood of healthy individuals, its presence is a sure indication of the presence of metastatic cells.
The company as developed an assay kit for detecting this peptide. A trial based on this kit has just been concluded. It compared samples from 40 cancer patients with samples from 20 healthy individuals. The results were statistically significant and indicated a significant difference between the two categories of blood samples. The peptide was not detected in any of the healthy samples but was clearly identified in most of the cancer patient samples.
When development of the assay kit is complete it will serve as the basis for a diagnostic kit. Such a kit could make it possible to track the course of the disease in patients and provide a clear indicator of the effectiveness of treatment and each patient’s individual responses to a therapy regime. The first type of cancer investigated by the company is breast cancer; in the future the kit will be expanded for use with cancer of the ovaries, colon, and prostate. | 
