Launching Cureline Baltic's MetTracker™

Cureline Baltic is proud to launch its proprietary MetTracker™ technology, an innovative technique at the forefront of revolutionary cancer research

Given that Cureline Baltic is a pioneer of translational medicine and research, we’re aware of the limited efficacy prevailing in traditional cancer treatment methods, and especially when addressing the primary cause of morbidity in cancer patients, metastasis. Of the various touched-on drivers of metastasis, there lacks an effective model for testing new cancer drugs specifically against small metastatic sites.

DNA barcoding technology has emerged as a promising tool in biomedical research, providing a method to uniquely label and track individual cells using short, specific DNA sequences known as barcodes. DNA barcodes are extensively utilized to examine the natural development of organs and the progression of cancerous tumors.

Therefore, Cureline Baltic is advancing a novel double cellular barcoding technology – MetTracker^TM - designed to monitor the impact of drugs on primary tumors and metastasis on mice at a single cell level. The key innovation of this technology lies in the combination of two distinct sequences for cellular DNA barcoding: the first barcode, common to a cell line or cell population, and the second barcode, unique to each cell in the population.

The above image displays the procedure of MetTracker^TM technology deployment. Each cell from two cell lines is uniquely barcoded by lentiviral infection using two distinct barcodes: 1st barcode distinguishes each cell line, the 2nd barcode is unique for each individual cell within each cell line. The cells are co-injected into the mouse at a 1:1 ratio. Mice are treated with a particular anti-cancer medication for 10 days and tumor growth is recorded. After 10 days the tumor, liver and lungs (per the image's example) are excised and gDNA is purified from the whole tissue. The barcodes are amplified and sequenced by NGS. By analyzing the NGS data, it is possible to determine the total number of reads coming from each cell, sensitive/resistant cell read ratios and clonal distribution in each tissue.

Key MetTracker^TM Features

MetTracker^TM offers a powerful tool for cancer research, providing deeper insights into tumor heterogeneity and metastasis dynamics, while being similarly priced to standard xenograft studies. The ability to track individual cell clones and their treatment response in vivo provides more nuanced understanding of therapeutic efficacy and resistance development. This is especially critical for metastatic disease, where conventional measurement techniques may not capture the complexity and variability of tumor response.

MetTracker^TM enables quantitative evaluation of drug effects at the cell population level, as each cancer cell carries a unique barcode. This feature is particularly important when studying metastatic spread providing single cell level metastasis detection. The ability to track individual cell clones and their treatment response in vivo provides more nuanced understanding of therapeutic efficacy and resistance development. This is especially critical for metastatic disease, where conventional measurement techniques may not capture the complexity and variability of tumor response.

Although MetTracker^TM technology does use animals, the precision enabled by barcoding of cells enables reduction of animal groups by 2-3 fold and also reduce the study timelines, thus optimizing animal research. These refinements contribute positively to animal welfare and study costs, which in turn offset the costs of sequencing and data analysis.

More in-depth information can be found in the following link on MetTracker’s^TM White Paper, where we display its unmatched technological applicability in evaluating tumor drug sensitivity and efficacy.