Lumito's product offering comprises an instrument and staining reagents based on UCNPs (upconverting nanoparticles). The instrument is used to provide pathologists and biomedical analysts visual depictions of tissue samples as an input for making diagnosis. The tissue samples are stained using specific reagents to create imaging with higher contrast and thus improve the chance of reaching the correct diagnosis.
Lumito's patent family that describes the use of pulsed light to improve the efficiency of the technology and reduce the imaging time has now been approved in Korea. The patent has previously been approved in Australia, China, South Africa, the US and Japan. The Company is still waiting for approval in Canada, Europe and India. The Asian market corresponds to 30 percent of the world market.
– The approval of the patent application is an important step for us; Korea is the eleventh largest economy in the world and a well-established market, and resides at the forefront of the health sector. Our technology has several other potential applications and is, for example, expected to have serious potential in reducing the cost of drug trials, says Stefan Nilsson, CEO of Lumito.
The total market in brief
The global tissue diagnostics market is expected to reach approximately USD 8 billion by 2024, with a growth per annum of about 10 percent, according to Tissue Diagnostic Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trend and Forecast, 2016-2024.
Lumito's technology in brief
Lumito's technology is based on the use of upconverting nanoparticles (UCNP) as markers for imaging of tissue in living organisms (in-vivo) as well as of tissue samples in laboratory settings (in-vitro). With traditional fluorescent imaging, a background emission of light called autofluorescence occurs in the tissue and results in low-contrast images. Autofluorescence thus makes the analysis less precise. As opposed to traditional fluorescence microscopy, Lumito's technology makes it possible to stain with immunohistochemical methods and UCNPs in parallel to visualize with both visible light and fluorescent signals. For a specific tissue sample, Lumito's instrument thus both provides a digital pathology scanner for traditional visible light imaging and offers all the advantages of UCNP-based fluorescent imaging, at the same time.
