Capital Biosciences has been awarded $150,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Cancer Institute. The overal goal of the proposed project is to investigate the feasibility of employing real-time qPCR method for detection of telomeric C-circle DNA in peripheral blood of patients with cancers that utilize Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres (ALT) as their Telomere length Maintenance Mechanism (TMM).

The aim of Phase I is to determine the correlation between radioisotope and qPCR assays; first on a large panel of tumor cell lines available from ATCC and then on peripheral blood of cancer patients. Defining the ALT[+] cell lines in the ATCC collection has both fundamental and practical values, first by determining the prevalence of ALT and second by having confirmed panels of cell lines that can be used for research. Outcome of this research will allow large scale screening of tumor cell lines, tissue samples and blood samples from cancer patients.