Genomic Expression Receives $4.2M Grant to Validate Its OneRNA™ Liquid-Biopsy Platform in Bladder Cancer
Boston (PRWEB) | January 3, 2018
The OneRNA4Bladder project aims to save lives and halve the cost of care for bladder-cancer treatment. Bladder cancer is the most expensive cancer to treat due to expensive diagnostic procedures and ineffective drugs resulting in a recurrence rate of 70%.
The OneRNA4Bladder project, which validates a urine-based diagnostic and liquid-biopsy platform, has already been shown, in a smaller 500-patient study, to outperform cystoscopy in terms of sensitivity and specificity. For this reason, it may substitute the invasive, expensive cystoscopy procedure in the diagnostic workup for bladder cancer and for the identification of recurrence. To our knowledge, no other technology has successfully met this endpoint. Most other non-invasive tests add cost to the management of the disease instead of reducing cost simply because, instead of replacing cystoscopy, the test can only provide a supplement to it.
The new immune checkpoint inhibitors have recently been approved for bladder cancer. However, with a low overall response rate of 15%, this will soon become a very expensive option, driving up cost. Genomic Expression has developed a way to sequence RNA quickly and inexpensively and then link the statistically changes in tumor RNA to drugs that could provide more durable responses. This technology is called OneRNA™, and, applied as a liquid-biopsy platform, it can quickly and effectively diagnose cancer, select treatment, and measure response and recurrence.
Overall, this solution will guide patients toward more effective treatments, reduce the number of cystoscopies and biopsies, identify patients with a higher likelihood of responding to new, expensive immunotherapy treatments, and, finally, reduce the cost of bladder-cancer treatment.
