Impact | Ultraplacad
Colorectal cancer is a lethal disease responsible for more than 200,000 deaths per year in Europe, with similar absolute numbers for men and women. It is the second most common cancer in Europe in terms of incidence rates (after breast cancer) and also the second cancer in terms of mortality, with only lung cancer contributing more cancer deaths. Early detection through population screening has been shown to reduce the mortality from colorectal cancer. Unfortunately, colorectal cancer screening campaigns suffer from low compliant rates linked to the invasive currently available diagnostic methods. Standard clinical protocols for people at high risk of developing colorectal cancer detection are based on colonoscopy and tissue biopsy, which involve sampling cells with the use of small-gauge needle. Tissue biopsy is also applied for the surveillance and follow-up of patients with colorectal cancer, and in these cases the procedure is even more invasive, and sometimes technically challenging or even impossible.
ULTRAPLACAD has developed a new plasmonic system for minimal-invasive colorectal cancer diagnosis based on the ultrasensitive analysis of nucleic acids and protein biomarkers circulating in human blood. These characteristics put ULTRAPLACAD at the forefront of molecular diagnosis technologies as a unique and up to now not existing platform for the comprehensive detection of nucleic acids and protein biomarkers in blood plasma. Moreover, it offers the advantage of reduced sample contaminations, analysis time, assay costs due to reduced complexity of assays and respective readers.
Very few FDA approved non-invasive methods for colorectal cancer screening have been available only recently. Based on cost analysis and benchmarking of the existing commercial systems (digital PCR) ULTRAPLACAD system seems to be very competitive, with estimated manufacturing cost for aTAA (200 analytes), ctDNA (50 spots) and miRNA (8 spots) reasonable, if compared to dPCR cost (10 EUR per mutation).