Trade.Information

Product Name: Breast cancer

Product Description

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the U.S., with an estimated 215,000 new cases and 41,000 deaths in 2006. Breast cancer is a curable disease when detected at an early stage. Nevertheless, physicians and patients are required to make difficult therapeutic decisions during the course of treatment, which would be facilitated by advanced diagnostic techniques.

Current diagnostic tests - A mammogram is the standard of care for screening for breast cancer. In the U.S., an annual mammogram for the early detection of breast cancer is recommended for every woman aged 40 and older. Approximately 54% of women in this age group actually have mammograms performed, resulting in approximately 32 million mammograms per year in the U.S. However, mammograms have high false negative rates, especially in cases where the cancer is in an early stage and the tumor size is small. Mammograms also have a high false positive rate. Over a million breast biopsies are performed every year in the U.S., of which 80% yield no form of malignancy, resulting in unnecessary cost and discomfort. Since the early stage detection of breast cancer is crucial to increasing survival rates, there is a significant need for a more sensitive and specific non-invasive diagnostic test for detecting early-stage disease.

In addition, the current standard of care for breast cancer patients also includes adjuvant chemotherapy. However, there is scientific evidence suggesting that only an estimated 15% of breast cancer patients benefit from such adjuvant chemotherapy. Due to the toxic side effects, required time commitment and significant economic burden associated with chemotherapy, the ability to distinguish between those patients who will benefit from the treatment and those who will not is very important. It estimated that such decisions will be necessary for 135,000 patients in the U.S. in 2006.

Our strategy - We are focusing our R&D efforts on developing diagnostic tests for Breast cancer to determine the risk of recurrence and whether a patient will benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy. In addition, we intend to develop a non-invasive test to diagnose breast cancer based on body fluid samples.

Company Details

Rosetta Genomics is an international leader in diagnostic and therapeutic product development and medical research involving micro-ribonucleic acid, commonly known as microRNA. Rosetta has developed an extensive integrated platform in microRNA... more