Craif's urine cancer risk test took the Grand Prize itself and the Governor's Special Award for Women's Empowerment. The judges cited early-stage detection of pancreatic cancer and the ability to assess several major cancers from one urine sample.
Craif Inc., a 2018 spinout from Nagoya University that develops tests for early cancer detection, today announced that miSignal Scan, its urine cancer risk test, received two awards in the fiscal 2024 Tokyo Metropolitan Venture Technology Grand Prize, a competition organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The product won the Tokyo Metropolitan Venture Technology Grand Prize itself and the Governor's Special Award for Women's Empowerment.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Venture Technology Grand Prize is run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the prefectural-level government of Tokyo, and is open to small and medium-sized enterprises. It is a business and technology award. It is not a clinical validation, not a peer-reviewed result, and not a regulatory authorization in Japan or anywhere else.
What the judges cited
The award program published four reasons for selecting miSignal Scan:
- The ability to detect pancreatic cancer, which is considered hard to find early, at an early stage with high accuracy.
- The ability to assess several major cancer types individually in a single test.
- Ease of testing, because the test runs on a urine sample.
- The scale of the product, including the expectation that it could be deployed outside Japan.
About the Tokyo Metropolitan Venture Technology Grand Prize
The Tokyo Metropolitan Venture Technology Grand Prize is a competition organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Its stated purpose is to promote the development and sales-channel expansion of products, technologies and services from small and medium-sized enterprises, and to publicize the strongest of them inside and outside Japan.
Entries are judged on five criteria: novelty and creativity, technical completeness, originality, market potential, and growth potential. The award recognizes companies judged strong across all five. Certificates are presented by the Governor of Tokyo at an award ceremony held during Sangyo Koryuten 2024, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's annual trade fair for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Award date: November 21, 2024. Organizer: Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
About the miSignal series
The miSignal series is a set of cancer risk tests aimed at prevention and early detection. It consists of miSignal Scan, which assesses cancer risk using microRNA and AI; miSignal Light, a simpler assessment of cancer risk; miSignal Navi, a cancer-focused genetic test; and miSignal Check, which monitors DNA damage as an input to prevention.
Every test in the series requires only a urine or saliva sample. Craif describes the series as a single connected approach: understand your constitutional risk, monitor day-to-day DNA damage to support prevention, and detect early cancers that prevention does not stop.
Important information about miSignal
The miSignal series is not a medical device. It determines risk by statistically calculating analyzed information. It does not replace a diagnosis, which is a medical act, of whether a person has cancer, and a result indicating low risk does not mean that cancer is absent or that the person will not develop cancer in the future.
About Craif
Craif is a venture company founded in 2018 that originated at Nagoya University. It holds NANO IP (NANO Intelligence Platform), a core technology that detects microRNA and other disease-related biological substances with high accuracy from body fluids that are easy to collect, such as urine. Craif uses NANO IP to develop tests intended to enable early detection of cancer and care tailored to the individual.
Company details
- Company name: Craif Inc.
- Representative: Ryuichi Onose, Representative Director and CEO
- Established: May 2018
- Business: research and development of next-generation tests for early detection of disease, centered on cancer, and for individualized medicine; provision of the miSignal urine cancer risk test
- Head office: ITP Hongo Office 5F, 2-25-7 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
URL: https://craif.com/
