Leuko Receives $4.5 Million NIH Grant to Advance Non-Invasive Blood Testing

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute has awarded a $4.5 million grant to Leuko to further develop PointCheck, the first solution to enable non-invasive white blood cell monitoring.

Funds from the SBIR Phase IIB grant will accelerate product development and generate clinical evidence to commercialize this platform technology. “At Leuko, we are committed to deliver on our vision for non-invasive blood testing, which could transform how cancer patients and other immunocompromised populations are managed,” Leuko Co-Founder/CEO Carlos Castro-Gonzalez said. “Thanks to this NIH grant, we will advance to the next stage of clinical development and move closer to making this technology widely available to patients.”
 
White blood cell monitoring is particularly relevant for cancer patients who receive chemotherapy and other treatments that target cancer cells but can also destroy white blood cells, compromising the immune system. Such a compromise leads tens of thousands of cancer patients annually to contract dangerous infections that can turn deadly if unmanaged.
 
Doctors currently monitor patients is through blood tests, which practically limit the frequency of monitoring. But Leuko’s at-home, non-invasive monitor, PointCheck, can give doctors a more complete view of their patients’ health remotely. Rather than drawing blood, the device uses light to look through the skin at the top of the fingernail, and advanced algorithms to analyze and detect low white blood cell levels.
 
By removing the need for a blood sample, Leuko enables at-home, and more frequent monitoring so at-risk patients can be identified early, enabling the care team to deploy preventive treatment that can avoid infections, reduce hospital admissions by 50%, and improve clinical outcomes.
 
Leuko spun out from MIT and the Madrid M+Vision Consortium. Co-founded by Castro-Gonzalez, Ian Butterworth, Aurelien Bourquard, and Alvaro Sanchez-Ferro, the company is developing PointCheck, a platform technology to non-invasively measure blood parameters. For its first application, Leuko aims to improve clinical outcomes for more than 2 million cancer patients annually, reduce their chemotherapy-related hospital admissions by 50%, and save over $4 billion in healthcare costs.