The mDETECT labs at Queen’s University are cooking up something potentially life-saving — a minimally invasive way to monitor breast, lung, and prostate cancers and potentially identify when treatments stop working 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 using similar blood-based cancer testing, Frosst says its approach stands out by keeping the testing process local.
Get weekly health news
“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.”
The provincial government is now investing half a million dollars into the company through its life sciences innovation fund. President and CEO Dr. Christopher Meuller says the funding will help the testing cross the finish line.
“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 the initial focus is on monitoring metastatic cancer, Frosst says the same technology could eventually help detect harder-to-find cancers.
“There are lots of issues in, for example, ovarian and pancreatic cancers, where they’re often diagnosed in 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 is targeting later this year to roll out its lung cancer tests, with breast cancer tests expected to follow in the new year.
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.