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CRI
Woburn: Tackling the mystery of tumors
If a biotech company needs a picture of a tumor inside a mouse, it may turn to Woburn-based CRI Inc.
The 50-person company will add five to 10 workers this year, as demand for its tumor imaging products takes off. And it’s not just animal imaging. Some of the benchtop devices, which weigh a couple hundred pounds, are used to examine slices of human tumors, not just to detect if they are growing, but why.
The “why” is the reason the company is attracting the attention of big pharmaceutical companies that are increasingly targeting cancer therapies to certain patient populations based on the pathway driving the tumors growth.
The equipment is beginning to be used not just to assess the progress on a clinical trial, but to help design trials in the first place. The rush to personalized medicine in the pharmaceutical industry is driven by the promise of better patient outcomes that come with targeted therapies. It’s also driven by the fact that approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration may be easier to come by if drug makers can show high rates of success for a particular subset of patients.
“We have been in a slow but steady march toward personalized medicine. Not all cancers are created equal,” CEO George Abe said.
He added that previous methods of accessing tumor growth have been rudimentary — for instance, grinding up samples of tumors. By losing the geographic relationship between the parts of the tumor, he said, you can tell if it’s growing, but not how or why. Other technologies looking at tumor slices under microscopes have been less sensitive.
Successful personalized medicines such as Herceptin, which targets a certain type of breast cancer, represent a class of drugs that attack one pathway of tumor growth. In the future, Abe said, drugs will target several different pathways simultaneously, and technologies like CRI’s will help. A top-10 pharmaceutical company is currently using CRI’s technology to image and compare skin tissue samples to determine the efficacy of its treatment.
Eventually, the devices may make their way into clinicians’ offices, to aid doctors in diagnosing which subtype of cancer a patient has developed. But CRI isn’t there yet. Current uses don’t require FDA approval, but use for diagnostic purposes would mean they would be classified as medical devices. Abe said the company is currently conducting clinical trials and plans to apply for FDA approval.
The company does not disclose revenue, but said average growth over five years has been 50 percent. Jonathan Witonsky, an analyst with consulting group Frost and Sullivan, said that the U.S. market for small animal imaging is about $120 million, and CRI is a significant player in that space. Witonsky said that right now, the nascent in-vitro optical imaging market, which includes tumor imaging, is only about $20 million, but is growing at a rate of 20 percent to 25 percent each year. So far, 500 systems have been installed worldwide, and the company is now developing a turnkey system that would include equipment and reagents, substances applied to the tumors used to see images of them better.
“We are also finding ourselves at a crossroads in pathology. It is just now going digital,” said senior scientist David Fletcher-Holmes. The company wants to be at the forefront of integrating images with electronic health records and has recently partnered with a Hungarian company that has expertise in digital slide scanning, for the slides that hold the tumor slices.
Read more: CRI Woburn: Tackling the mystery of tumors - Boston Business Journal
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