KIST, KIMM, Korea University Medical School "Join Forces"… Bladder Cancer Diagnostic Kit Company to Launch in Second Half of This Year

【 Cheongnyon Ilbo 】 A new diagnostic kit company focused on easy-to-use at-home urine-based bladder cancer detection kits is expected to be established as early as the second half of this year.

According to industry sources on the 18th, Dr. Jeong Young-do of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Biomolecular Recognition Research Center, Professor Kang Seok-ho of the Korea University College of Medicine Department of Urology, and Dr. Lee Dong-jin of the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) have embarked on founding Float Bioscience.

The founders stated that the exact date of incorporation is still under discussion, but they plan to establish the company as early as the second half of this year to begin full-scale development and sales of urine-based bladder cancer diagnostic kits.

They also plan to expand the diagnostic kit business beyond urine-based bladder cancer kits to include blood-based cancer diagnostic kits and urological cancer diagnostic kits.

Float Bioscience is developing and commercializing a urine-based early bladder cancer diagnostic kit capable of uniform mass production.

The team was selected as the first preliminary convergence startup team under the "Convergence-Type Startup by Government-Funded Research Institutes" initiative, promoted through the "Commercialization Joint Promotion Task Force for Government-Funded Research Institutes," launched in April of last year. They will receive in-kind support of up to 100 million KRW in commercialization costs from the National Research Council of Science and Technology (NST).

NST plans to support Float Bioscience with connections to public technology commercialization accelerators, provision of office space, direct investment of 200 million KRW or more in the future, and linkage to the TIPS program.

The urine-based early bladder cancer diagnostic kit under development at Float Bioscience is designed to allow convenient at-home diagnosis of bladder cancer, including early-stage cases.

The kit operates by having a buoyant signal carrier — generated when a film bound to a biomarker is disrupted — migrate to an oil layer to produce a signal. This design prevents impurities such as hematuria from interfering with the signal, maximizing signal amplification and enabling accurate biomarker detection.

In a double-blind clinical trial conducted by the Department of Urology at Korea University involving 80 patients and 25 healthy individuals, the diagnostic kit demonstrated a sensitivity of 88.8% — more than four times higher than the 20% sensitivity of existing commercial tests.

Furthermore, while early-stage bladder cancer diagnosis was nearly impossible with conventional methods, the newly developed kit is able to detect early-stage bladder cancer with high accuracy.