VentureBeat - Latest Comments in How not to write about cancer diagnostics

Re: How not to write about cancer diagnostics

Joe — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:44:15 -0000

The status is, Onconome is suing one of their chief collaborators for fraud: http://chronicle.com/articl...
And now the worldwide rights to the technology, regardless of its merit, will lie festering in a litigation trap for years. Good job fellas.

Re: How not to write about cancer diagnostics

infosecgeorge — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:14:29 -0000

Two years later... What is the status of the EPCA-2 trials?

Re: How not to write about cancer diagnostics

David Hamilton — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:46:35 -0000

Terry, thanks for your comment. I did, however, want to point out that EPCA-2 is not only a lab test, but also a commercial product under development by Onconome, which has exclusive worldwide rights to the technology.

I know the clinical-trial process can be slow and that it frustrates many patients and their loved ones. But if a test like EPCA-2 is going to drive clinical decisions -- and really, that's the only reason to care about it, because if it doesn't catch cancer earlier and improve patient survival, what good is it? -- it needs to be proven to work. And that means doing the prospective trials that will show that there's actually a benefit to screening for EPCA-2, since otherwise it's just one more unproven diagnostic that will suck up healthcare resources and quite possibly result in unnecessary surgeries and their attendant side effects. A test that doesn't actually show you what you think it does can do a lot more harm than good.

I don't even know how you'd begin to design a double-blinded study for something as singular as a moon shot. Clinical trials are for studying population effects, not for solving engineering problems.

Re: How not to write about cancer diagnostics

Terry Mahoney — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:50:00 -0000

EPCA-2 is a Lab Test! Not a new drug being hyped by some profit-oriented pharmaceutical marketing organization.

The "gold standard" - a long-term, double-blind survey on a randomly selected population is of academic curiosity, and serves as a leash commercial marketing of new drugs. As such, it is useful to protect the public. But the EPCA-2 test need not be so restricted.

If NASA had used the equivalent of the controlled double-blind study during the Apollo program, the U.S. would probably still be trying to get to the moon. Not to mention the trillions of dollars that would have been wasted.