When a Client Dropped Its Microfilter Project, Cha Mei Tang Kept Going and Found a New Way to Read Cancer in Blood

POTOMAC, Md. The order came from a client. Creatv MicroTech was asked to make tiny filters that could pull circulating tumor cells out of a blood sample. Then the client walked away from the project. Cha Mei Tang, ScD, the company's founder and chief executive, could have shelved the filters. Her team kept testing them instead, and that choice turned an engineering shop into a cancer diagnostics company.

Creatv had not started out in medicine at all. Its early work was in X ray imaging, where Dr. Tang and her staff made precision antiscatter grids that cut down on scattered X rays and sharpen the picture. Collaborations with institutions such as Argonne National Laboratory helped the company earn a name in microfabrication.

That skill set traced back to her own training. Dr. Tang earned her bachelor's, master's and Doctor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory she studied relativistic electron beams and free electron lasers and rose to head the Radiation and Accelerator Physics Section, and she later spent a sabbatical at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The American Physical Society made her a Fellow in 1990, and in 1992 she received the WISE Award for Science as the most outstanding woman scientist in the federal government.

When the team began running patient blood through its filters, something unexpected showed up: very large cells that nobody seemed to be studying. Dr. Tang has said that when Creatv first found them, no one had published anything on how they might be used clinically, even though the cells are big and turned up in every cancer type the team examined. Daniel L. Adams, now the company's chief scientific officer, took on a systematic study and gave them a name, cancer associated macrophage like cells, or CAMLs.

The filter itself became CellSieve. Within minutes it strips away the red cells and most of the white cells in a blood sample, leaving the rare cells behind where they can be seen and identified. Those include circulating tumor cells as well as CAMLs.

Creatv built its LifeTracDx blood test on that platform. The company reports that CAMLs appear across cancer types and stages but not in healthy people, and it describes uses that run from early detection to checking whether a treatment is working, measuring PD L1 expression, spotting minimal residual disease after therapy and watching for recurrence. In some settings the test can indicate treatment response about thirty days after the first dose, and the captured cells can supply DNA for sequencing.

Moving from research to patients has meant building a clinical operation. Creatv began offering LifeTracDx in 2025 through its CLIA certified laboratory in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, and has pursued CAP accreditation so physicians can order the test while broader regulatory work goes on.

Dr. Tang has been frank about what stands in the way. Many oncologists have never heard of CAMLs, and FDA approval requires large, costly trials across many cancer types. Her plan is to seek approvals one application at a time, starting with breast cancer, to work on insurance reimbursement, and to reach patients abroad through international partners rather than selling outside the United States directly.

The work has piled up a long record. Her technology won an R&D 100 Award in 2006, and Montgomery County, Maryland, named Creatv its Bioscience Company of the Year in 2013. She has contributed to more than 160 journal articles and book chapters, holds dozens of issued patents tied to cancer research, became a Senior Member of IEEE in 1995 and belongs to the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Physical Society.

Dynamo Times recognizes Cha Mei Tang for turning a discontinued engineering job into a new line of cancer research and for bringing a physicist's precision to the problem of finding cancer in a simple blood draw.