CellControl Biomedical Laboratories AG

"We want to see what the cells say," declares Nils Behnke, PhD, a member of the board of directors of CellControl Biomedical Laboratories AG . The company believes that the ChemoSelect chemosensitivity test it is currently developing will help oncologists determine the type of drug therapy most likely to be successful in any given patient. Instead of guessing which type of chemotoxic agent will be most effective at killing an individual's tumor cells, CellControl hopes doctors will use its diagnostic test to evaluate the effect of four to seven single substances or drug combinations—and only then select a treatment.

The technological roots of the ChemoSelect test reach back to drug-screening work that Rainer Metzger, PhD an academic scientist who founded CellControl's predecessor company in 1995, originally carried out on...