Before Creatv Looked for Cancer in Blood, Cha Mei Tang Led Accelerator Physics Research for the Navy

POTOMAC, Md. The scientist who now runs a cancer testing company spent the first part of her career thinking about particle beams. At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Cha Mei Tang was a supervisory research physicist and head of the Radiation and Accelerator Physics Section, responsible for research on how radiation and accelerated particles behave. That training in physics and engineering still shapes the way her company, Creatv MicroTech, approaches every problem it takes on.

Her schooling was concentrated in one place. Dr. Tang earned four degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: a Bachelor of Science, a Master of Science, an engineer's degree and a Doctor of Science. She credits a logical, step by step method of solving problems for much of her success in each field she has worked in.

Before the Naval Research Laboratory, she held technical posts in applied research. She worked as a senior engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and as a senior scientist at Jaycor Inc. Each role added hands on experience in turning theory into working hardware.

Her physics work drew national notice. The American Physical Society elected her a Fellow in 1990. In 1992, Women in Science and Engineering gave her its WISE Award for Science as the most outstanding woman scientist in the federal government. The IEEE named her a Senior Member in 1995.

From 1993 to 1996 she was a guest scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 1996 she founded Creatv MicroTech in Potomac, Maryland, as a microfabrication company that builds very small, very precise metal and polymer structures. The company's portfolio includes X ray masks with narrow slits cut through thick gold, antiscatter grids for X ray imaging, collimators for nuclear imaging and solid copper waveguide circuits for 220 GHz radar systems.

That precision work earned an R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine in 2006 for antiscatter grids and nuclear imaging collimators developed with Argonne National Laboratory, and the same year Micro Nano Newsletter listed the technology among its 25 Technologies of Tomorrow. Creatv researchers continue to publish on X ray imaging. Dr. Tang is a coauthor of a 2023 paper in Nanotechnology on freestanding gold masks for phase based X ray microscopy and of a 2026 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on three dimensional imaging of soft tissue with a laboratory X ray microscope.

The biology came later. Creatv reincorporated in 2000 to add biological applications such as detecting E. coli in food and water, and in 2010 it began research on a blood test for cancer. Using its own CellSieve microfilters, the team collected circulating tumor cells and also found large tumor associated cells that the company calls Cancer Associated Macrophage Like cells, or CAMLs. Creatv scientists were the first to publish on CAMLs in the blood of cancer patients in 2014, and the company reports that dozens of independent groups have since validated the finding.

In 2024 Creatv announced that its CAML biomarker would be used in a Phase 3 trial in metastatic breast cancer expected to enroll 404 patients. Blood samples taken at baseline and after treatment are sent to Creatv to measure circulating tumor cells, classify CAML subtypes and monitor PD L1. "The use of biomarkers like CAMLs holds great promise in helping clinicians determine whether a patient is responding to a specific therapy in a timely manner," Dr. Tang said at the time.

Today Creatv has three divisions. The Microfabrication Division continues its engineering services, Creatv Bio carries out cancer diagnostics and screening research, and LifeTracDx offers blood testing through a CLIA certified laboratory. The company reports research across more than 30 cancer types, eight potential clinical and diagnostic applications, 163 journal publications and book chapters and 57 issued patents.

Dr. Tang is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Physical Society and the IEEE. In 2013 Montgomery County, Maryland, named Creatv MicroTech its Bioscience Company of the Year.

Dynamo Times recognizes Cha Mei Tang for a career that moved from accelerator physics to precision manufacturing to cancer research, carrying the same discipline from one field to the next.