Richard Brand, CFO for Laboratory for Advanced Medicine
Chapters:
00:00 Are we now realizing the promise of early cancer detection?
05:15 Why is the methylation route so promising?
08:00 What tests are you commercially offering now?
15:27 Are the tests covered by insurance?
19:24 What about over treatment as a result?
25:32 What tests next?
The great promise of liquid biopsy technology is in early cancer detection. That is, it's the great future promise. Right? This past month at the annual cancer conference, ASCO, we heard about one such flagship company announcing just which technology they were going to use to do it--DNA methylation.
Well . . .it turns out there is a company, Laboratory for Advanced Medicine, that has been using DNA methylation for their liquid biopsy early cancer detection tests for a couple years already. Tests which are for sale now. On their website, they say they are "saving lives by detetecting cancer early." Presenting data for their technology back in 2017, the company offers two liquid biopsy tests commercially: one for liver cancer and the other, a broader test which confirms that a patient has a cancer, either lung, breast, colon or liver.
“This general test has clinical utility because often times the physician and the patient might have a concern about cancer because of symptoms. The physician has done other tests and eliminated other ailments, and the patient and physician have come to a working hypothesis that maybe the patient has a particular type of cancer. And so they do this test with us, and we report back with high accuracy that, yes, they do have a cancer or, no, they do not.”
Richard Brand, the CFO for Laboratory for Advanced Medicine, reviews with Theral the company’s tests, telling of several use cases over the past couple years and previews the tests on the horizon. The company looks to be ahead of the pack in a growing field.
