No more tears over mammograms: Company develops painless breast cancer screening

Would more women get screened for breast cancer if the test was less painful, less […]

Would more women get screened for breast cancer if the test was less painful, less expensive, more reliable and easier to get? If they only had to do a saline wash of their eyes in a doctor’s office?

That’s the hope of Ascendant Diagnostics LLC, which is developing a new tear-based screening process for early detection of breast cancer.

Doctors would use one of the company’s kits to take tear samples, which have a high volume of proteins, from patients and ship them to a central location, said Ascendant’s senior scientist Anna Daily at a UAMS Roundtable last October (see the video below).  Using mass spectrometry, laboratory staffers would look at the protein profile of the tear sample to check for the presence of certain protein biomarkers and then send results back to the doctor.

This process would be less expensive and less painful than a mammogram, and especially advantageous to women with dense breast tissue, Daily said at the roundtable.

The Arkansas Science & Technology Authority awarded the company a $100,000 seed investment to assist in early studies last year, and now Ascendant Diagnostics is looking to raise $350,000, according to a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. A call to CEO Omid Moghadam was not returned.

According to the company’s website, it hopes to make the test available to patients in limited circulation within two years, with the ultimate goal of making it a standard in yearly health screenings for women at a high risk for breast cancer and women over 40.

Given the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of breast cancer screening, Ascendant’s technology would need to deliver impressive trial results for that to happen. Accurate detection in the earliest stages of cancer could be crucial: Survival rate in breast cancer is above 75 percent when it’s detected in phase two or earlier, but drops off in stage three, according to the American Cancer Society.

New imaging and gene testing techniques have been the predominant players in recent innovation to guide breast cancer diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. But the U.S. market for breast cancer detection and diagnostic technologies totaled $2.1 billion in the U.S. in 2008 and is expected to reach $2.8 billion by next year, according to Medtech Insight.

Down the road, the company would like to turn the test into a point-of-care diagnostic, Daily said.

Formed in September 2010 with technology licensed from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences , Ascendant is a portfolio company of the technology venture firm Virtual Incubation.

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