Truetide (AIM:TRUE) announced that its wholly owned investee Paraytec has successfully completed Phase 2 of a feasibility programme with US-based VosBio, testing whether breath samples can be used to detect early signs of lung cancer.
The AIM-listed investment company holds Paraytec outright and is working to identify and incubate commercially viable diagnostic technologies through it.
Phase 2 set out to show that breath condensate collected with VosBio's Universal Breath Collector contains recoverable extracellular vesicle-like particles, and that these can be measured consistently on Paraytec's CX300 fluorescence detection platform.
Paraytec reported successful recovery of the particles, a workable sample-preparation method for reproducible CX300 readings, baseline characterisation of particle number and size, and stable signals with negligible carryover between samples.
"The collaboration and the feasibility programme funded by VosBio are progressing well," said Trevor Brown, chief executive of Truetide.
"These results demonstrate the potential for the CX300 platform to be applied in an area of significant unmet clinical need in early cancer screening," he added.
Paraytec and VosBio agreed non-binding heads of terms in June to explore combining VosBio's breath-collection technology with Paraytec's CX300 instrument, which can detect labelled biomarkers at picomolar concentrations, with a definitive collaboration agreement still to be signed.
Phase 3 is now underway, focused on developing fluorescent antibody labelling to identify specific EV sub-populations linked to the lung microenvironment, including alveolar epithelial, pulmonary endothelial, macrophage-positive and EGFR-positive EVs, with Truetide saying it will update shareholders as the definitive agreement and subsequent development phases progress.