platinDx · A test for predicting the efficacy of common platinum drugs enabling personalized chemotherapy for bladder cancer patients.

Platinum-based chemotherapy is the primary therapeutic intervention for over 500,000 patients per year in the EU. Although some patients are cured by this type of chemotherapy, as many as 75% of lung cancer patients and 60% of bladder cancer patients show no benefit and could be more appropriately given alternative treatments, and therefore over €4bn annually is wasted on unnecessary treatments. There is a need for a rapid, accurate test to distinguish those patients who are likely to respond to chemotherapy and those who are not. Accelerated Medical Diagnostics aim to personalise chemotherapy for cancer patients through their own developed PlatinDx assay, which can be used to identify those patients which are appropriate for platinum-based chemotherapy. Cancer patients are given a microdose (1% of the therapeutic dose) of a platinum-based drug, followed by quantitation of drug-DNA adducts in biopsy tissye using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). Levels of drug-DNA damage are measured by AMS in white blood cells and tumor biopsy tissue, which are used as a predictor of therapeutic response. Within the innovation project Accelerated Medical Diagnoistics intend to: gain medical certification within the EU; run a scaled up clinical trial to gain significant results; and adress the EU market and launch their service in the EU.