The m DETECT labs at Queen’s University are working on something that could save lives – a less invasive method to track breast, lung, and prostate cancers, which might help spot when treatments stop being effective months earlier than current scans.
“We’re able to see if their cancer levels are changing,” says chief scientific officer Keira Frosst. “If the patient is responding or not to therapy with these blood tests, and we’ve seen progression on a treatment about six months prior to CT scans, which could give the patients about six months less time on treatment that’s ineffective to them and help them find a new therapy earlier.”
While other companies are also using similar blood-based cancer testing, Frosst mentions that their approach is unique because it keeps the testing process local.
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“A lot of other companies right now have tests that are being shipped to centralized facilities, often in the U. S.,” she said. “And one of the bigger ideas with our tests is that we’re actually able to keep it in house, in the hospital, in Canada, in Ontario.”
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The provincial government is now putting half a million dollars into the company through its life sciences innovation fund. President and CEO Dr. Christopher Meuller states that this funding will help bring their testing closer to completion.
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“It helps us to develop some of the clinical studies that we’re doing to provide evidence that, in fact, our tests work appropriately and are able to help patients and also speeds up the commercialization process.”
While they initially focus on monitoring metastatic cancer, Frosst believes this same technology could eventually assist in detecting harder-to-find cancers.
“There are lots of issues in, for example, ovarian and pancreatic cancers where they’re often diagnosed at very late stages, so the question is can we detect those patients earlier if we were able to use our tests on them?”
The company aims for later this year to launch its lung cancer tests, with breast cancer tests expected soon after in the new year.
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