Agendia and Angsana work towards breast cancer testing in Southeast Asia
Agendia, Inc., a world leader in personalized medicine and molecular cancer diagnostics, and Angsana Molecular & Diagnostics Laboratory Pte Ltd, a subsidiary of Parkway Pantai, announce a partnership to market the MammaPrint Breast Cancer Risk of Recurrence test and the BluePrint Molecular Subtyping test to physicians across Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Myanmar.
The partnership will enable women in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Myanmar to access the benefits of MammaPrint and BluePrint to personalize treatment management decisions for early breast cancer.
In total, almost 25,000 women in these markets will be diagnosed with breast cancer each year (1). Under the terms of the agreement, physicians in these markets can now send their patients’ samples, via Angsana, for testing at Agendia’s CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited laboratory in Irvine, California.
MammaPrint analyses 70 genes most associated with breast cancer recurrence and provides a binary result to identify women with early-stage breast cancer who are at a genomic Low or High Risk for distant metastasis within five years. BluePrint analyses 80-genes which classify breast cancer into functional molecular subtypes, each with marked differences in long-term outcome and response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
These tests provide essential information to aid physicians in making informed and personalized treatment management decisions which can reduce the risk of potential over treatment and the associated side effects to provide the best outcome for that patient.
Chris Barbazette, Chief Commercial Officer at Agendia said: “South East Asia represents a significant growth opportunity for Agendia and a commercial priority for the Company. With their extensive experience in molecular diagnostics and regional insight, Angsana is an ideal partner as we continue to build our presence in this rapidly-evolving market. We are seeing increasingly more physicians and patients in these countries recognizing the clinical utility of gene expression testing in tailoring the treatment management of breast cancer. Working with Angsana we can most effectively serve these requests, improving access to the practice-changing benefits of the MammaPrint and BluePrint tests.”
Dr Daniel Tan, Chief Executive Officer, Angsana Molecular & Diagnostics Laboratory said: “Breast cancer makes up almost one-third of all cancers diagnosed among women in Singapore and Malaysia. Importantly, more than two-thirds of these cases are discovered at an early stage, where survival rates are significantly higher. MammaPrint helps to empower these early stage breast cancer patients by providing extra genomic information, enabling them and their oncologists to make informed, confident decisions about their treatment, and avoiding the side-effects of unnecessary chemotherapy. The test can also help to reduce the patient’s overall treatment costs, making valuable medical resources available for other patients.”
The scale of the potential quality of life and cost-effectiveness benefits of MammaPrint were demonstrated in the landmark MINDACT trial published in 2016. MINDACT found that almost 50 percent of patients initially identified as at high risk of their cancer recurring using clinical and pathological factors and therefore candidates for chemotherapy, were in fact low risk according to the MammaPrint test and unlikely to benefit from it (2).
Based on a review of the findings of this trial, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) published a dedicated update to its breast cancer clinical practice guidelines in July 2017 (3). It named MammaPrint as the only test of its kind recommended to inform treatment decisions for both lymph node-positive and lymph node-negative breast cancer patients. MammaPrint is also included in other important international oncology practice guidelines including the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), the St. Gallen Breast Cancer Consensus.
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