What Do Cancer Cells Feel Like?

No medical challenge receives more scientific scrutiny than curing cancer. But diagnosing cancer, and doing so early, is also a key part of effective treatment. 

Cellens, a startup founded by Tufts graduate students and researchers, is using a new approach to diagnose bladder cancer earlier and less invasively: measuring how cancer cells feel.

Jean Phuong Pham, EG21, is the CEO and entrepreneurial powerhouse behind Cellens. Pham co-founded Cellens with a cohort of fellow Tufts engineering graduate students in partnership with Igor Sokolov, professor of mechanical engineering and Bernard M. Gordon senior faculty fellow in mechanical engineering at the Tufts School of Engineering. 

Using Sokolov’s research, Cellens is applying physical and mechanical principles in biological settings (a field called mechanobiology) to develop cancer diagnostics that directly measure the biophysical properties of individual cells. The company recently completed a $6.5 million fundraising round from reputable venture capital funds and corporate strategic investors to help validate their technology in larger clinical studies.

Raised in Vietnam with a self-made businessman as a father, Pham says that her path has always been in entrepreneurship. From her undergraduate psychology degree at The College of Wooster, she gained an understanding of how to build and motivate a team, a skill she sees as the core of entrepreneurship. After college, Pham moved to Boston to work at UMass Boston’s Venture Development Center, where she helped researchers develop their ideas into impactful technology. There, Pham became committed to translating novel engineering research into real-world inventions.

Through her work running VietChallenge, a nonprofit supporting Southeast Asian entrepreneurs, Pham connected with Kevin Oye, executive director of the Tufts Gordon Institute and director of Tufts master’s of science in innovation and management (MSIM) program. Seeking to grow her engineering entrepreneurship skills and make an even greater impact, Pham decided to apply to the program.

In a seminar her first year at Tufts, Pham became intrigued by Sokolov’s novel usage of mechanobiology to detect bladder cancer. “It's very elegant, using physics to detect cancer, and completely non-invasive,” Pham said. “All the features of a potentially impactful product were there.” 

Over the course of her MSIM program, Sokolov, Pham, and several of her classmates formed the core team behind Cellens. The team's innovation ultimately won both the medical devices and life science tracks and the Ricci Interdisciplinary Prize at Tufts New Ventures Competition (previously the Tufts $100K New Ventures Competition) in 2020.

“Jean and Igor are wonderful role models for how our research faculty can leverage [MSIM] graduate students to build tech ventures that translate their research into investable and compelling ventures that can transform healthcare,” Oye said. “It’s been gratifying to see Jean and Igor continue to work together to launch Cellens and raise multiple rounds of funding.”

As a theoretical physicist studying quantum field theory and the large-scale universe early in his career, Sokolov was not the likeliest candidate to head up a medical device company. But as a young academic at the University of Toronto, he sought to apply his research to more tangible challenges. He connected with a microbiologist colleague and quickly discovered how much physics had to offer the medical world.

Sokolov is now an expert in mechanobiology and atomic force microscopy—the technique Cellens uses to create high-resolution, three-dimensional cell scans. And since moving to the United States, he has used that expertise to start several device companies. Along the way, he has learned how to navigate the complicated set of factors—clinical need, usability, insurance access—that determine whether a product will succeed. And while starting up Cellens together, Sokolov imparted these lessons to Pham.

Using a ‘Finger’ at Nanoscale

In Cellens’ early days, Pham and Sokolov spoke with dozens of clinicians and researchers about current practices for diagnosing bladder cancer and where the remaining gaps were to ensure their tools would be fit for purpose.

While 95% of patients whose bladder cancer is detected early can survive to five years and beyond, the rate is only 10% for those whose cancer is metastatic at diagnosis. Diagnoses are generally made with an invasive procedure called cystoscopy in which doctors lead a scope through the urethra to look at the bladder lining. 

Since current treatments are not effective in preventing recurrence, cystoscopies must be repeated to check for progression and to see if the cancer has returned. These frequent procedures, which often have complications, contribute to bladder cancer being one of the most expensive cancers to monitor and treat. Cystoscopy also often fails to detect low-grade tumors and certain other forms of the disease.

To create high-resolution, three-dimensional cell scans, Cellens uses the expertise in mechanobiology and atomic force microscopy of Professor Igor Sokolov, shown here in his School of Engineering lab. Photo: Alonso Nichols

Cellens takes a different approach, utilizing urine samples that can be taken non-invasively. Using atomic force microscopy, a microscopic probe—or nanoscale “finger”—touches on cells from the urinary tract lining to feel for distinctive biophysical properties of cancer. Cancer cells often have softer cytoskeletons than regular cells, a characteristic that the Cellens platform can measure directly to distinguish between cells shed from bladder tumors and healthy ones.

Another of the company’s innovations is to pair these novel lab techniques with machine-learning algorithms trained on data from healthy and in-treatment patients—and to great success. In an early clinical study, Cellens’ BioFeel platform detected every case of recurrence in nearly 100 urine samples, performing significantly better than available molecular tests.

These promising results are hard-earned, the fruition of countless hours spent by Pham chasing fundraising opportunities and pitching Cellens to potential investors. Her efforts have earned Cellens the financial support needed to develop a product ready for clinical trials.

“I am really thankful to Jean for taking this risk, because, in the beginning, the risk is very high,” Sokolov said, noting the high failure rate of medical startups. “Jean worked off a very modest salary to get this started. For all of this, I have great admiration and respect for her.”

In addition to Cellens’ origins in research conducted by Sokolov, Tufts remains key to the company’s ongoing success in other ways, including development support from the Tufts Technology Commercialization Office for the company’s intellectual property portfolio and connecting with independent board members from the Tufts alumni network.

“Throughout the whole four- or five-year process of building the product further, every major milestone for us has Tufts involved in it,” Pham said.

The next step of this process is a multi-center clinical validation of the preliminary BioFeel data in collaboration with several Boston-area cancer hospitals. This clinical evidence will be critical for seeking federal laboratory testing certification and FDA clearance of BioFeel’s portfolio of tests.

Pham envisions the BioFeel platform could eventually be applied to other cancers detectable from fluid samples, such as cervical or esophageal cancer, expanding the impact of Cellens’ non-invasive diagnostic technology.