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LUNG CANCER

LungExpress Dx™ is a gene expression-based qPCR prognostic test for early stage non-small-cell lung cancer. LungExpress Dx™ provides valuable information regarding each patient’s prognosis for survival to more effectively guide treatment and improve the selection of patients for chemotherapy following surgical removal of their cancerous tumour.

By using LungExpress Dx™, physicians and their patients may more effectively determine, in the case of patients predicted to have a good prognosis, whether to avoid unnecessary, highly toxic and expensive chemotherapy or, in the case of patients predicted to have a poor prognosis, to undergo chemotherapy to increase the likelihood of a cure. By assisting in targeting treatment to those patients who are most likely to benefit, the test has the potential to improve patient outcomes and save substantial treatment costs. If diagnosed early and properly treated, lung cancer may be cured.

LungExpress Dx™ was developed over the last four years by a UHN team of experienced and internationally acclaimed researchers and physicians at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. The team was led by Dr. Ming-Sound Tsao, holder of the M. Qasim Choksi Chair in Lung Cancer Translational Research, and Dr. Frances A. Shepherd, holder of the Scott Taylor Chair in Lung Cancer Research and the Chair of the National Cancer Institute of Canada Clinical Trials Group Lung Cancer Site. Drs. Tsao and Shepherd have in total authored more than 400 articles in peer reviewed journals.

The UHN team initially reported the results of their research at the 11th World Conference of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer and the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, with full publication in December 2007 the Journal of Clinical Oncology (Lau et al. J Clin Oncol 25: 5562; http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/35/5562).

UHN and MBI will collaborate in even larger-scale testing to confirm the results of LungExpress Dx™ prior to commercialization.

About Lung Cancer
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the western world and accounts for more deaths than breast cancer, prostate cancer and colon cancer combined. In the United States, 213,000 new cases of lung cancer were expected in 2007, and more than 160,000 individuals were expected to die as a result of the disease. Approximately 85% of all cases of lung cancer are the non–small-cell type. Furthermore, approximately 30% of all patients will be diagnosed with either stage I or II disease (early stage), which percentage is expected to increase due to continuing advancements in early detection.

Diagnosis and treatment of patients with lung cancer costs approximately $9.6 billion per year in the United States alone, with an average per patient expenditure of approximately $21,000 in the first year following diagnosis.

Early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer patients are treated primarily by surgical removal of their tumors. However, 30% to 55% of these patients die as a result of the disease, implying that patients diagnosed with the same stage of disease can have markedly different treatment responses and overall outcomes. Currently, tumor stage remains the strongest predictor of survival but fails to account for this difference in patient outcomes.

LungExpress Dx™ will address this critical issue by more accurately determining each patient’s prognosis for survival in order to effectively guide treatment and improve the selection of patients for chemotherapy.

 

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