ACD Advantage

The promise of personalized medicine is greater efficacy at lower cost, because treatments will be targeted based on the molecular profile of a disease in individual patients.

 

There is still a large gap between this vision and current reality. Studies show that today as many as 70% of cancer patients are non-responsive to the therapy they have received. Certain patients are predisposed to damaging side effects, which cannot be predicted well using current diagnostic technology. Guesswork still predominates, with the attendant imbalance between cost and result.

 

It all goes back to the fundamental difficulty in the identification and validation of biomarkers for companion diagnostics. That’s where ACD’s RNAscope™ comes in. By unlocking the power of RNA, ACD’s RNAscope™ becomes a catalyst for personalized medicine, benefiting every contingency in the healthcare universe.

 

For pharma/biotech: RNAscope™ makes it possible for pharmaceutical and biotech companies to validate candidate biomarkers faster and less expensively. The technology clears the path to new, targeted therapies by making RNA biomarkers more actionable, and getting companion diagnostics to market sooner. Pharmaceutical companies will be able to get new drugs through successful clinical trials quickly, with lower cost and less risk.

 

For physicians: Sooner rather than later, medical professionals will have an arsenal of next generation therapies and companion diagnostic tests to determine which drug a patient will be most likely to respond to with the fewest side effects. They will be able to treat what was once untreatable with certainty, not guesswork. They will also be able to track treatment efficacy throughout the course of therapy, at the molecular level.

 

For patients: Patients will benefit from selection of the right drug based on the molecular classification of their disease subtypes. Breast cancer alone, for example, may have as many as 15 different subtypes. So, improving patient outcome for cancer and other chronic diseases is really about treating many disease subtypes, with individually tailored therapy. Although we haven’t found a cure for cancer, RNAscope™ technology puts us that much closer.

 

For payors: Because right patients are using the right drugs, drug response rate will improve and toxic side effect will reduce. Thus companion diagnostics also promises to make a major contribution to the reduction of health care costs while improving efficacy and safety.