LAUSANNE, Switzerland – September 28, 2021 – Lunaphore, a Swiss life sciences company developing technology to enable spatial biology in every laboratory, today announced several presentations featuring the company’s spatial biology technologies at the Spatial Biology US conference taking place virtually September 27 – 30, 2021. Presentations will feature COMET™, Lunaphore’s all-in-one staining and imaging platform for high throughput, hyperplex immunofluorescence, and LabSat®, the company’s compact and open automated tissue staining instrument for immunohistochemistry and multiplex immunofluorescence.

Register for the event here.

 

PRESENTATION DETAILS

 

• How to Optimize a Hyper-Plex Immunostaining Panel in a Fast and Robust Manner

Date and time: September 29, 2021 / 4:30 – 5:00 PM ET

Speaker: Saska Brajkovic, Head of Application Development, Lunaphore

 

• Spatial Proteomics: A Journey to Adopt New Highly Multiplexed Immunohistochemistry Technologies ¹

Date and time: September 29, 2021  / 2:20 – 2:40 PM ET

Speaker: Alexander Klimowicz, Senior Principal Scientist, Boehringer Ingelheim

 

• Live Q&A Session & Ask the Experts 2 ^{1 2}

Date and time: September 29, 2021 / 3:10 – 3:30 PM ET

Speakers: Alexander Klimowicz, Senior Principal Scientist, Boehringer Ingelheim; Barbara Cahill, Senior Global Portfolio Manager for Immunohistochemistry, Consumables and Cytology, Epredia

 

• From One Week to One Day: Take Control of Your Research by Automating Tissue Microarrays, Multiplexing, Whole Slide Scanning and AI Analysis for Enhanced Bioinformatics ²

Date and time: September 29, 2021 / 8:40 – 9:10 AM ET

Speaker: Barbara Cahill, Senior Global Portfolio Manager for Immunohistochemistry, Consumables and Cytology, Epredia

 

Disclaimer:

¹ Not sponsored by Lunaphore.

²  Sponsored by Epredia, exclusive distributor of LabSat® in the US, Germany and UK.

 

About Lunaphore

Lunaphore Technologies S.A. is a Swiss company born in 2014 with the vision of enabling spatial biology in every laboratory. Lunaphore has developed a game-changing chip technology which can extract spatial proteomic and genomic data from tumors and transform any simple assay into multiplex spatial biology without complexity. Lunaphore empowers researchers to push the boundaries of research to ultimately develop the next generation personalized therapies. For further information on Lunaphore and its products, please visit www.lunaphore.com.

 

For further information contact:

 

Irene Tamayo

Lunaphore Corporate Communications

Email: [email protected]

We are happy to announce the appointment of Dr. Carlo Bifulco, an expert in Translational Molecular Pathology and Pathology Informatics, to our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) to provide strategic advisory support to the company’s scientific activities and product portfolio development.

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We are happy to announce the appointment of Matthias Weber, former President of Leica Biosystems, to Lunaphore’s Board of Directors.

Mr. Weber (MD, Ph.D.) brings extensive experience in the cancer diagnostics and immunohistochemistry fields, marked by excellence in a range of diverse strategic roles including Product Management, R&D, Operations, Sales & Marketing, and most notably as President at Leica Biosystems, a leading $1B Cancer Diagnostics company.

With this appointment, Lunaphore aims to strengthen its position in the field of spatial biology.

Read the full press release

We are happy to announce the formation of our Scientific Advisory Board with the appointment of Dr. Paolo Ascierto and Dr. Jérôme Galon, two experts in the immuno-oncology field that will provide strategic advisory support to the company’s R&D activities and product portfolio development.

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Lunaphore is proud to announce that 2 new key team members have joined the company:

John Marotta, member of the Board of Directors:

John Marotta is the new Board member at Lunaphore and the President & CEO of Epredia, a PHC Group company focused on anatomical pathology.  In addition to his role at Epredia, John is also a Corporate Officer for the PHC Group, and the Co-Domain Head for the Life Sciences and Diagnostics Domain.  PHC Group is owned by KKR, as the largest shareholder.

Prior to joining Epredia, John’s most recent role was Senior Vice President of Supply Chain, Procurement, Real Estate, IT, Envista Business Systems and the LatAm Region. John has held senior level positions as a former Vice President and General Manager, President and CEO, Board member and other commercial and operations roles in companies such as Danaher, Cardinal Health and Emerge Medical. John began his career at Johnson & Johnson operating companies, Janssen Pharmaceutica and DePuy Synthes Orthopaedics, where he held various commercial roles.

Everton Robinson, VP Sales:

Everton Robinson is a highly experienced International Commercial Business Leader. He comes with a proven track record of success in building multi-disciplinary commercial operations infrastructure for innovative and disruptive technology providers in the life science and diagnostic industry. Everton has  joined Lunaphore from NanoString Technologies, where he was Director of EMEA Life Science and Diagnostic Sales Operations and established the EMEA commercial organisation from the ground up to 50 FTEs across all functional areas. Prior to NanoString,  Everton held various management positions at Illumina, ThermoFisher, Roche, Life Technologies,  achieving career revenues from $5M to >$120M.

Everton gained his Doctorate in Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry from The University of Sussex, United Kingdom. He is also a qualified Advanced Executive Leadership coach.

Lunaphore has once again been recognized as being one of the most innovative technology companies among the young entrepreneurship landscape in the country.

In this occasion, the Swiss Economic Award, granted by the Swiss Economic Forum, which is the most important young entrepreneur prize in Switzerland, has selected Lunaphore as the top 3 young companies in Switzerland.

We are happy to know that the efforts of our incredible team are being recognised and we will continue to strive for the best.

After finishing in the podium of the TOP100 Swiss Start-Ups Award in 2019, we are happy to announce that Lunaphore has now entered in the TOP25 Swiss Scale-Ups  ranking, a recognition of the most promising and steady growing companies in the country that have the potential of becoming the next Swiss unicorns. The Finalists were revealed during the 2020 TOP100 SSU Award night.

We are happy to announce that we have entered into a distribution agreement with Epredia, a global leader in precision cancer diagnostics and tissue diagnostics.

Under the terms of this agreement, Epredia have been appointed the exclusive distributor of the LabSat® Research platform in the US, UK and Germany, where Epredia will start to distribute the product in July 2020, as well as Japan, where the commercialization will begin in 2021.

Read the full press release

Lunaphore Technologies SA, a Swiss life-sciences company developing innovative next-generation equipment for cancer research and tissue diagnostics, announces the first closing of its Series C funding, amounting to CHF 23M. The round was led by the Japanese strategic investor PHC Holdings Corporation, a global healthcare company that owns Epredia, a leading provider of comprehensive solutions for precision cancer diagnostics.

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We are happy to announce the publication of our latest scientific paper in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Soltermann (University Hospital of Zurich) and Prof. Gijs (Laboratory of Microsystems at EPFL, Lausanne).

The article was published in Microsystems and Nanoengineering, a member journal of Springer Nature, discussing “Microfluidics-assisted multiplexed biomarker detection for in situ mapping of immune cells in tumor sections”.

You can read the full, open-access paper here.

With this study, we provide a proof-of-concept of the use of microfluidics for the automation of high-multiplexed immunostaining. In order to analyze the tumor microenvironment, understanding the spatial organization of multiple biomarkers present on a tissue section is of key importance. With this purpose, it is possible to stain and visualize several targets simultaneously with the technique known as “multiplexed immunofluorescence”, the fluorescent staining of multiple biomarkers on the same tissue sample.

Differently from other single-plex immunostaining techniques, multiplexing allows to save scarce tissue sample material while it enables quantitative analysis such as identifying correlations on several cell families and their activation status within the tumor microenvironment.

In this study we have demonstrated the potential of our microfluidic staining device to stain 10 markers of relevance in the field of immuno-oncology (CK, CD3, CD4, CD8, FOXP3, CD20, CD68, CD56, PD-1, and PD-L1) in a sequential immunofluorescence protocol consisting of cycles of staining-imaging-elution of antibodies. We have also shown a quantitative approach for the automation of both the experimental and analytical methods with our system.

Lunaphore’s automated device is based on the FFeX technology, utilizing a microfluidic tissue processor capable of staining each marker within 9-11 minutes. This microfluidic chip is equipped with an imaging window. It is therefore referred to as Look-Through-Chip (LTC) and is located in the staining module of the instrument. The imaging system has been integrated in the device and can image through this chip, in order to fully automate the staining-imaging process. The study included as well high-quality image-processing algorithms to map each cell in the entire tissue, identifying the coexpression and colocalization patterns of biomarkers in order to classify the immune cells and their activation status.

“Combining the rapid immunofluorescence staining achieved with our microfluidic technology, together with an integrated microscopy system, we are able to perform high-plex assays using off-the-shelf unlabeled primary antibodies in unprecedented times” said Diego Dupouy, Lunaphore’s CTO. He added: “We are currently developing a high-throughput instrument to run 40-plex assays in a fully automated manner using the method demonstrated in this study”.

Indeed, the advantages of microfluidics in a microscope-integrated multistaining instrument are numerous: 1) It is possible to automate high-multiplexing protocols. 2) The number of markers stained can be very high. In this study we have shown the automation of a 10-plex but the system allows to stain up to 40 markers on one sample. 3) Finally, the use of standard unlabeled primary antibodies will prevent issues related to availability often occurring with the use of labeled antibodies that are required by alternative multistaining techniques.