OncoHealth to provide patient- and lab-friendly assays

A professional calling. My specialty is in commercializing disruptive technology for the medical field. When I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in the early 1980s, I attended a conference where I heard a Genentech scientist describe his work in cloning insulin, as part of developing therapies to benefit diabetes patients. I decided then and there that my professional calling was to facilitate and accelerate scientific discoveries that would have practical applications—and ultimately would improve people's lives.

HPV: Innovation and patient benefits. I've been involved with numerous technologies that have proven successful in the marketplace. Of these, I believe OncoHealth's innovative technology, which is designed to improve HPV-associated cancer screening and diagnosis, initially for cervical cancer, may have the most impact. Cervical cancer is the second leading cancer killer in women worldwide. In the United States, the Pap test has gone a long way towards reducing cervical cancer rates, but it lacks sensitivity and produces high rates of false positives. An estimated four million women each year have abnormal Pap results involving morphology changes that will usually regress on their own. Newer molecular tests can identify women who are infected with the human papillomavirus (HPV), the cause of cervical cancer, but cannot distinguish between benign infections and those at the pre-cancerous or cancerous stage. The clinical challenge lies in knowing which women have infections that require more invasive diagnostic procedures or treatment. OncoHealth's proprietary technology uses leftover material from cervical cytology samples to detect increased expression levels of E6E7 oncoproteins, which are associated with HPV-caused cancers. This will identify women who can benefit from treatment, while enabling women with benign HPV infections to avoid unnecessary invasive procedures.

When tests are most effective. I believe that the market for innovative diagnostic tests that can truly provide clinically actionable information for disease management will continue to grow significantly in the years to come. Effective tests should answer clinical questions that can improve early disease detection, as well as increase treatment efficiency, helping to avoid unnecessary procedures that contribute to waste in the healthcare system and to emotional costs for patients.

Developed and developing countries. “Onco” stands for cancer, since our test is intended to aid in the detection of cervical cancer. “Health” refers to our objective to provide important information for better health management of HPV-infected patients. For cervical cancer screening and diagnosis, we believe that in developed countries, our technology will improve patient care and provide significant healthcare cost savings by prompting treatment for women who need it and reducing unnecessary repeat testing and invasive procedures for women with benign infections. In developing countries, we believe our solution has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives by focusing scarce resources on women who truly need treatment.

Tests that help labs function effectively. We plan to make our testing technology available via analyte specific reagents to CLIA labs for use in ELISA, immunohistochemistry, immunocytochemistry, and flow formats. This will enable robust, easy-to-use, affordable, and high-throughput assays that can potentially be conducted for diagnosis, screening and confirmation of cervical cancer and, later, other HPV-associated cancers like oral, anal, and head and neck.