RESEARCH/DEVELOPMENT

COLORECTAL CANCER AND CURRENT PATIENT CARE

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer type worldwide with 1.8 million new cases, yearly. The primary treatment is surgery. Unfortunately, as many as half of the operated patients have recurrent disease and die from their cancer.

Cancer cells in lymph nodes close to the primary tumor constitute the most important indicator of risk for recurrent disease in operated patients. It is therefore imperative that cancer cells are accurately detected and evaluated for aggressive cancer cells have the ability to metastasize to other sites in the body.

Chemotherapy is today the most common postoperative treatment for colorectal cancer patients with cancer spread to lymph nodes.

Today’s routine method for cancer cell detection in lymph nodes is manual histopathological examination of hematoxylin and eosin stained lymph node tissue sections. This method is rather crude, subjective and does not discriminate between degrees of cancer cell aggressiveness. As a result – the method fails to detect all patients with cancer cells in their lymph nodes, and erroneously point out others for treatment, that is not medically warranted. As a consequence, a considerable number or colorectal cancer patients are subject to less than optimal care, with both over- and under-treatment as a result.

RESEARCH BASED IMPROVEMENT

HiloProbe has developed ColoNode® – a new type of biomarker test for colorectal cancer. The ColoNode test can investigate the whole lymph node volume objectively with high sensitivity and specificity. In addition, it can determine the level of aggressiveness of the detected cancer cells. The ColoNode biomarker combination has been validated in comparison to the routine method, and has scientifically been shown to be superior for prediction of recurrent disease in three previous studies.

RESEARCH FUNDED BY:

Cancerfonden
Vetenskapsrådet-NT
Stig och Ragna Gorthons stiftelse
Birgit och Henry Knutssons stiftelse

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