Business
Aethlon Medical Receives National Cancer Institute Contract Award
SAN DIEGO, Sept. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Aethlon Medical, Inc. (Nasdaq: AEMD), a therapeutic technology company focused on unmet needs in global health,
About this update from Aethlon Medical, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"SAN DIEGO, Sept. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Aethlon Medical, Inc. (Nasdaq: AEMD), a therapeutic technology company focused on unmet needs in global health, announced today that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded the Company an SBIR Phase 2 contract for Topic 359, a solicitation entitled \"Technologies for Differential Isolation of Exosomes and Oncosomes.\" This solicitation prioritized the advancement of technologies for isolating exosomes from biofluids for applications in oncology research and clinical care. This contract will be funded with Federal funds from the NCI, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. 75N91019C00042\nExosomes are nanoparticles that are abundantly released from cancer cells and carry the complement of a tumor's genetic and protein cargo, making them important targets for non-invasive liquid biopsies in cancer. Aethlon is actively developing assays in this area through its majority-owned subsidiary, Exosome Sciences, Inc. However, there remains a need for high-throughput and selective technologies which isolate exosomes from various bodily fluids that could be adopted in clinical workflows. A technology that resolves the bottleneck in methods for obtaining pure populations of exosomes is anticipated to have wide applicability to be paired with downstream genomic sequencing, proteomic profiling tests and, potentially, for the development of therapeutic products. \nAethlon's contract, entitled \"A Device Prototype for Isolation of Melanoma Exosomes for Diagnostics and Treatment Monitoring\", will potentially advance a device having the capabilities of isolating exosomes derived from cancer cells and from the bulk of other vesicles and complex proteins present in fresh and archived biofluids. The work to be performed will focus on melanoma exosomes, with anticipated wider applicability to other cancer types. This work follows from Aethlon's successful completion of a Phase I contract for the Topic 359 solicitation that ran from September 2017 through June 2018. The Phase I work demonstrated the capabilities of a laboratory version of Aethlon's proprietary technology, the Hemopurifier, as an exosome-isolation device by processing biofluid samples to obtain intact preparations of melanoma exosomes. Following on the Phase I work, the deliverables in ...