Although its personalized medicine`s products aren’t in the market yet, the test for early colon cancer detection, ‘ColoFast’, might be available the next year in the European Union and the United States of America. How do Amadix’s advances benefit cancer patients? Find out below.
Amadix is a Spanish biotech company founded in 2010 that develops early detection tests for different types of cancer. Their installations are placed in Valladolid and owns a oficine in Madrid as well. It also provides advise to research groups from more than 20 countries, including The United States, Germany, Japan, among others. The company is currently developing three innovative non-invasive tests for early colon, lung and pancreas cancer detection and diagnosis. Its next objective is to anticipate to other types of cancer.
In cancer, personalized medicine uses specific information about a person’s tumor to help diagnose, make a prognosis, plan treatment or to find out how well the treatment is working. Amadix´s personalized medicine strategy aims to provide diagnostic tools that support the physician’s decisions about patient management, in order to give the right treatment to the right patient.
Colorectal cancer
Colorectal cancer can take from 10 to 15 years to develop. It’s the third more common type of cancer among men and women around the world, and represents a 10% out of all the types of cancer.
Colon cancer is the fourth biggest cause of death by cancer in the world, and represents an 8,5% out of all the deaths by cancer. It is a fact then, that the detection of colon cancer is a priority to the health authorities around the world. ColoFast, the most advanced product in the company, is a simple non-invasive blood test, carried out before the colonoscopy in order to detect colorectal cancer as soon as possible.
The objective consists in analyzing all men and women over 50 years old, to early diagnose the cancer and prolong their lives. If the test’s results are positive, a colonoscopy would prevent the tumor.
Lung Cancer
Lung cancer is the most common type of cancer in the world. More than 1.61 million people are diagnosed every year. It’s also the most common cause of death by cancer, with 1.38 million of deaths (18.2% of the total). Increasing the survival rate in lung cancer patients is a great challenge to modern oncology, especially when the patients who survive more than 5 years are still less than a 15% in all cancer stages. In order to reduce its mortality, an early diagnosis is crucial.
Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is efficient in the early detection of the lung cancer. However, a lot of Indeterminate Pulmonary Nodules (IPN) are found and they cannot be defined as benign or malignant. DiagnoLung is a non-invasive test (plasma-based) used for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) diagnosis and as tool a tool for high-risk screening population.
It is an ELISA-three-protein based test, addressing those individuals under low dose computed tomography screening to avoid false positive nodules in the images. The test intends to decrease the high false positive rate in screening; identifying persons with malignant IPN who should undergo more rigorous and invasive diagnostic evaluation and confirm diagnosis of lung cancer.
Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer is the 10th most common cancer diagnosis among men and the 9th most common among women in the United States. However, is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in occidental countries and has the worst prognosis of all major malignancies with just a 6% five-year survival rate and a median survival of less than 6 months.
Incidence of pancreatic cancer in the US and most of developed countries continue to rise with forecast claiming that it will be the second most fatal cancer in the US by 2030. Suspected cases are primarily identified through imaging (e.g., ultrasonography, computed tomography and magnetic resonance).
But because of the lack of early symptoms, aggressive growth and early dissemination, 80% patients are diagnosed at late stages with advanced distant metastases, which make their disease surgically inoperable. PancreaDix is an innovative non-invasive signature in blood for the detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and pre-neoplasic lesions. It is a molecular test based on the expression quantification of microRNAs by RT-qPCR technique. The test will improve the early detection of pre-malignant and malignant lesions and enable physicians a better management of patients with pancreatic cancer and other pancreatic pathologies.
Amadix wins at the South Summit 2018
South Summit is a global innovation platform, leader in business opportunities. It brings together the most important participants of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Recently, Amadix was selected as the best proposal among the 100 emerging companies that competed for the South Summit 2018 award.
This award will allow Amadix to carry out a crowdfunding campaign in Seedrs, and also, to compete for the one-million-dollar prize, for financing, in the Silicon Valley Startup World Cup, which will take place in San Francisco, on May 2019.
Other companies were awarded as well:
Sheetgo has been recognized as the ‘most scalable’ startup. It creates internal solutions on the spreadsheets to automate and make its data more reliable. Valerann, the British startup, is the ‘most innovative’ project, for its cloud-based traffic management system. Clicars, the Madrid startup to buy cars online, won an award for the ‘best team’. Also, the following awards were given: Valerann, Smart Mobility. Byhours, Travel & Tourism. Lovys, Fintech. Tink Referral as a Service, Content & Channels. Alias Robotics, B2B Enterprise Tech. BeON Energy, Energy. Sense, Edtech. SHEETGO, B2B Enterprise services. Clicars, B2C. And the first ‘South Summit Award Top Entrepeneur 2018’a José Lladó, founder and president of Técnicas Reunidas.
Finally, it can be said that experiencing cancer personally, or being a family member or a friend of someone who suffers it, is an extremely painful event. Investigations such as those carried out by Amadix are meritorious themselves, and any award and financial support granted to this cause is plausible. Thus, It is desirable that the product of so many efforts can be accessible to the entire population. The number of patients diagnosed in time by this product, will undoubtedly be proportional to the number of patients reached worldwide.
Could Amadix`s tests reach all the countries that need it? Will the test for early cancer detection which promote personalized medicine to the point of eradicating cancer deaths?
All hopes are willing for this to be the case.
