NKCL Bio Group announced that it had recently acquired a patent for a stimulant composition for rapid testing of natural killer cell activity and a test method using the same.

Ph.D. Shin Dong-hyeok of NKCL Bio Group said, “Normally, NK cells in our body are inactive, but they are activated and respond in emergencies such as external invasion. In other words, high NK cell activity means that you can better remove cancer cells and other mutant cells. NKCL Bio Group has developed a method to activate NK cells in a short time, In fact, the difference in activity of NK cells between cancer patients and normal people was confirmed and patent was registered.” “Unlike other companies that measure activity indirectly by measuring the amount of cytokines, our method measures NK cell activity of directly kills cancer cells. It measures their ability to kill," he added.

In the case of the existing NK activation test, there are too many variables in the method of measuring the amount of cytokines, so there is a large error in accuracy, which is insufficient to use as data for diagnosis or treatment. NKCL Bio Group's patented technology is highly accurate as it directly measures the ability to kill cancer cells.

There are many research results that reveal NK cell activity can be used to predict disease risk and maintain health as an indicator of immunity. It can also be used to predict future disease outbreaks.

In particular, since the activity of NK cells directly affects the anticancer activity of our body, the NK cell activity test can be used as a screening test for various types of cancer. Tissue biopsy is not only expensive, side effects that can occur in the process of removing body tissue are burdenful to patients, but NK cell activity test is easy to use as a screening test with only a small amount of blood regardless of patient.

In addition, NK cell activity in various carcinomas serves as a biomarker for the condition after treatment. Accordingly, the medical need for an NK cell activity test as a progress monitoring tool after chemotherapy is also increasing.

Through this patent registration, NKCL Bio Group secures the reliability of its NK cell activity measurement and Integrated service connection between biopharmaceutical business areas such as NK cell-based immunodiagnosis kit, immune cell therapy, bioreagent and NK cell automatic culture machine, and other anciliary businesses of health functional food and anti-aging program using NK cell culture medium, will be strengthened.

Meanwhile, the global in vitro diagnostic device market is worth about $29.8 billion (about 34.4 trillion won) as of 2019, and has grown at an average annual rate of 3.6% over the past five years, accounting for about 40.5% of the entire diagnostic medical device market.