AroCell’s TK 210 ELISA Blood Test is a Giant Leap towards Personalized Medicine for Cancer Patients

2013-12-10 22:40, Edited at: 2014-01-10 11:04

Today there is no good and easy way to determine if my cancer is growing or not. So how can I make difficult decisions about my treatments? Next year there will be a new and better tool from the Swedish company AroCell to help doctors and patients to better personalize the care strategy.

As defined by the U.S. President’s Council on Advisors on Science and Technology, “Personalized Medicine” refers to the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient… to classify individuals into subpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or their response to a specific treatment. Preventative or therapeutic interventions can then be concentrated on those who will benefit, sparing expense and side effects for those who will not.’’

70% of those diagnosed with prostate cancer will not die from prostate cancer and would perhaps be better off with 'watchful waiting'. Prostatectomy surgery, radiation therapy with x-rays or with proton therapy or with seeds and other expensive procedures can be avoided, and thus avoiding unnecessary suffering from complications. But how do you determine if you are in the ‘safe’ 70% or in the 30% for whom the disease may be fatal? PSA is not accurate enough to determine this. At Karolinska Institute in Stockholm they have for over 40 years been studying and researching this with a material of tens of thousands of patients followed for decades. In this pathology lab at the Karolinska Hospital thousands of cytology biopsy cell samples have been studied under electron microscopes and the number of cells in the S-phase of mitosis are painstakingly counted to get a measure of proliferation speed. The conclusion is that the only important predictive factor for tumor aggressiveness and patient outcome is the proliferation of cancer cells, i.e. the increased activity of cells dividing.

A simple blood test developed by AroCell will now make such predictive analysis very easy, automatic and accessible to millions of cancer patients around the world at a relatively low cost, and thus make better personalized medicine possible in cancer care.

AroCell’s TK 210 test is designed to work with existing technologies available in every blood lab in the world. It will become the gold standard. The product development and testing have been very successful and a stable product with a 10 months shelf life is developed and patented. The first RUO (Research Use Only) product will be released very shortly and a CE marked product is expected around the end of March of 2014.

Worldwide 15 million new cancer patients are diagnosed every year and around 100 million are living with a known cancer diagnosis. Most of cancer patients and their doctors will want to use this test several times per year, to see if treatments are effective and monitor for recurrences. I suspect that there will also be some off-label use for screening purposes. All the major diagnostic companies will be able to license AroCell’s test, unless one of them will acquire AroCell first.

At the current share price around 9 SEK the valuation of AroCell is about 150 MSEK or less than 20 million Euros. Shareholders can look forward to a 10x re-valuation when the product starts shipping and revenues ramp up. Target price is 120 SEK per share. Abbott, Roche or another giant may want to acquire AroCell, so this may become a quite interesting investment.

Detection and monitoring of cancerous tumor growth through a simple blood test is a true game-changer, a ‘Holy Grail’ in diagnostics. The test will be extremely useful for research and it will help millions of cancer patients, and it will make AroCell shareholders very happy too.

AroCell is listed on Aktietorget.