The Biosensor Platform
Hawkeye’s technology offers a highly differentiated approach for measuring activity related to inflammatory disease. It represents a new preventive screening paradigm for cancer.
Enzyme activity is at the heart of all biological activity in humans. Pathologies emerge when these pathways become misregulated. Hawkeye’s novel biosensor technology can detect the activity levels of enzymes rather than simply their quantity. This is an exciting new approach to test for chronic inflammatory diseases such as cancer or autoimmunity. The biosensors can be used with simple-to-obtain, non-invasive biological samples such as blood, saliva, urine or exhaled breath.
Hawkeye’s biosensors are a platform technology with applications across multiple disease models
Proteases (proteolytic enzymes) are linked to human disease due to their change in expression in pathologies such as cancer, arthritis, neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases.
The initiation and progression of cancer reflects a complex series of changes in the genome and micro-environment of cancer cells. The inflammatory response to these changes causes a number of enzymes to be released at the site where the tumor is growing. These enzymes regulate the expansion of the tumor site and eventually lead to metastasis, where cancer cells escape from the primary site and move to other parts of the body.
Hawkeye Bio has developed a nano-scale graphene biosensor capable of measuring the activity levels of these specific enzymes in blood serum. The biosensor technology is simpler to operate than ELISA, more sensitive than PCR, and performs better than next-generation sequencing (NGS) for a fraction of the cost. Supported by a growing body of clinical data, this technology has the potential to change the diagnostic paradigm by boosting screening compliance to significantly lower mortality.
Hawkeye’s mode of action has been investigated in 14 cancers
While Hawkeye’s technology platform can detect many different diseases, the company is initially focused on producing a blood test for the early detection of lung cancer, including in asymptomatic individuals.