At Chimerocyte, we develop molecular technologies to detect and quantify allogeneic cells and/or DNA at levels of sensitivity and specificity that are not reached by currently available techniques. The objective is creating a highly sensitive quantitative chimerism test for use in clinical diagnostics, as well as for scientific research.

Chimerocyte, Inc. is cofounded by J. Lee Nelson, MD and Sami B. Kanaan, PhD. The biotech start-up has spun out from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle, WA) and is headquartered at CoMotion Labs at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Our efforts resulted in a panel of 28 highly-sensitive and polymorphism-(HLA and other genes)-specific assays, with limit-of-detection reaching ≤1:100,000 and for which a patent is pending.

Recently, we wished to transfer our technology into a clinical application: chimerism monitoring post allo-transplantation. The company is the recipient of an NIH grant aiming at extending the development and validation of assays to detect and quantify allogeneic cells (chimerism) and evaluating the clinical significance of this technology for leukemia patients treated by allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation.