2bind wins first place in the EU’s Eureka Eurostars competition, together with partners from the Netherlands and Great Britain.
September 2019 – The consortium around 2bind GmbH and Idris Oncology B.V. will receive funding over the next three years to develop a new cancer diagnostic tool. This tool aims to provide patients with improved and individualized therapy.
The consortium’s focus is on detecting metastasizing cells, which are to be filtered from the blood. These so-called circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which are very rare, can then be enriched and analyzed in more detail. This helps to monitor the success of therapy and adjust treatment if necessary, for example by testing different drugs on the cultivated CTCs. Such diagnostic tools are crucial for personalized therapy.
The call for proposals was highly competitive, and 2bind CEO Dr. Thomas Schubert is delighted: “We are very proud that our consortium took first place out of a whopping 325 proposals. It’s a testament to our expertise that we were so clearly selected for funding in this competitive format.”
The field of CTCs and liquid biopsy in general is a major trend with many players, which is why Schubert considers the win to be a special recognition of the partners in the consortium. “Liquid biopsy is a field with big momentum that will make an important contribution to cancer diagnostics, but also support cancer therapy. We are fortunate to have the expert team around Idris Oncology in our consortium, whose scientific findings form the basis of the joint project. I think we are very well positioned,” adds Thomas Schubert. 2bind will develop new biophysical analytical methods that will allow us to characterize and optimize binding molecules. Their task will be to effectively fish circulating tumor cells from the bloodstream.
