MIPS Project Challenge:
The goal of this MIPS project is to construct an optimized version of the company’s xMD (expression micro dissection) system so it can be tested in a clinical setting.

Project Scope:
While this project is in progress, researchers plan to build a beta prototype of the xMD system, after which it will be tested by the company in collaboration with Sinai Hospital in Baltimore.

Additional Information:
In the pathology clinic, the competition to xMD’s technology is the manual use of a razor blade. In order to separate cells of interest (e.g. tumor cells from surrounding cells), a pathologist circles a region on a tissue slide and then a lab tech uses a razor blade to scrape off the cells of interest. Not only is the process crude and lacks repeatability, but it is not applicable to the complex morphology of most tissue samples, where the target cells can be distributed in a complex way within the tissue sample.

In research labs (university-based medical schools, teaching hospitals, research and government laboratories), there is laser capture microdissection (LCM). In laser capture, a user manually points a focused laser at cell targets essentially one by one, fires the laser, and that small group of cells is lifted. The process uses complex microscope-based capital equipment (typically $250,000 per instrument), and takes hours per sample. LCM is a great research tool, has been around for 20 years, but it is not practical for a clinical setting. It is too expensive and takes too long. Pathologists cannot spend hours on a sample from one patient. For this reason, LCM has only penetrated into the research market.

xMD essentially combines the accuracy of LCM with the speed of a razor blade. It was invented at NIH by the same people that invented LCM twenty years ago, and has been exclusively licensed to xMD from NIH. (Source: xMD)