Product Benefits

Pacific Edge's potential product benefits are compelling and seek to address a number of important shortcomings in current disease detection and management, including the need for:

Earlier detection: Currently diseases such as gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, and bladder cancer are often diagnosed late in their development when treatment may not be effective. Screening methods to detect these conditions early in their development, such as that Pacific Edge is currently commercialising, are likely to result in dramatically better outcomes for patients.

Better characterisation: Some stages of cancer development are currently difficult to distinguish from tissue affected by non-malignant disease. This leaves a significant opportunity to increase both the specificity and sensitivity of cancer detection. For example, the recent early stage product developed by Pacific Edge for bladder cancer diagnosis is expected to provide clinicians with the opportunity to differentiate between the invasive and superficial sub-types of the bladder cancer in a non-invasive way and at an earlier stage than is currently possible, consequently leading to better patient management.

Lower cost: PEB is developing diagnostic tests based on assaying RNA or proteins from body fluids (such as urine or blood). These methodologies are low cost, as well as being mostly non-invasive and available for quick and efficient analysis. Lower cost tests are likely to result in more frequent screening and monitoring.

Non-invasive: Diagnostic tests today are often invasive and provide a significant deterrent for patients to seek early and regular screening. Often these existing tests are applied following the development of significant symptoms and can cause added anxiety for patients seeking diagnosis or monitoring. Pacific Edge's diagnostic tests are being developed for analysis of body fluids and therefore will be minimally invasive.

Greater accuracy: Many current tests are based on a single bio-marker with inherent lack of accuracy. The multiple bio-marker assays that we are developing are expected to provide enhanced accuracy and an ability to assay for multiple disease states or disease precursors.