A pilot program developed by DiaTech Oncology, privately held clinical pathology laboratory, and Walter Reed Army Medical Center wil help to determine the most effective chemotherapy for Cancer patients. Medical and GYN Oncologists from Walter Reed have been working with DiaTech Oncology (Nashville, TN) using the MiCK assay designed to help physicians in making specific treatment decisions. The study will eventually be introduced to other military hospitals and results will be collected on multiple cancers.
Previous studies have demonstrated the patented technology called the Microculture Kinetic (MiCK) assay can increase the patient’s response to chemotherapy, resulting in increased patient survival. In addition, the assay can guide the physician on single vs. combination therapy and when generic vs. proprietary drugs are more effective.
The American Cancer Society estimates that approximately 1.22 million new cancer cases are diagnosed every year. For more than 700,000 of these patients, some form of chemotherapy will be used in the treatment plan.
The treatment outcome for cancer patients could be dramatically improved if oncologists would include agents that are effective against tumor cells of a specific patient in the first line of therapy.
“To be able to predict the best chemotherapy treatment for cancer patients has been a goal for oncologists for many years and we now have the data that proves this technology works for all cancers. In addition the test can guide a physician on choosing between single drug or combination treatments and whether to use less expensive generic drugs or newer proprietary drugs based on which drugs will give the patient the most effective response,” said Dr. Cary Presant, DiaTech Medical Director, and Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.
In the MiCK assay, the tumor cells of an individual patient are exposed to multiple doses of several chemotherapeutic drugs either as single drugs or in combinations. A sophisticated algorithm is used to monitor and compute the amounts of apoptosis caused by each of the drugs to establish a drug sensitivity profile of the patient’s tumor cells. Knowledge of a patient’s drug sensitivity profile allows the treating oncologists to prescribe chemotherapy that would be the most effective against the tumor cells of that patient.
No other technology in the market today can measure apoptotic cancer cell death directly and predict chemotherapy treatment. The capabilities and performance of the MiCK assay technology far exceed those of any other cancer testing assays available in the current market. It is the only test assay available today with proof-of-concept outcome data, utilizing 45 different chemotherapy agents and numerous combinations of drug therapy. The MiCK assay has been used successfully to test all types of cancers and is the only test available that measures the chemotherapeutic drug effect for a specific patient kinetically and accurately.
