Chemotherapy is the primary therapeutic intervention for over 2 million cancer patients per year in the US. Although some patients are cured by chemotherapy, the approach has significant limitations such as chemoresistance, severe side effects and high cost. In particular, as many as 75% of some lung cancer patients treated with commonly used platinum-based chemotherapy show no benefit from this treatment course, resulting in over $2.5 billion wasted per year. Current diagnostics on the market for lung cancer chemoresistance are based on in vitro assays that fail to identify the majority of resistant tumors.
Accelerated Medical Diagnostics (AMD) is developing the PlatinDx assay, which provides direct measurement of in vivo cellular responses to a microdose (~1/100th the therapeutic dose) of platinum-based chemotherapy agents such as carboplatin and oxaliplatin. Although the microdose will not have any treatment efficacy, it safely allows measurement of tumor responses such as drug uptake, drug efflux and drug-DNA damage that are predictive of whether the therapeutic dose will kill the tumor cells. The method is based on accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), an ultrasensitive technology that is uniquely capable of measuring the fate of chemotherapy microdoses in clinical samples.
Currently we are conducting feasibility clinical trials in bladder and lung cancer patients using funding from an NIH/NCI contract. If our clinical trials are successful, we anticipate launching PlatinDx commercially in the next 2-4 years.
Management
Chong-xian Pan, MD,PhD and Paul T Henderson, PhD.
Both founders are UC Davis Medical Center Faculty
