Imagion Biosystems to advance early detection of breast cancer with biosafe imaging technology

MedTech News: The rate of escalating cancer prevalence and global oncology spending of $170 billion is compelling innovators to focus on early diagnosis.

Imagion Biosystems’ President and CEO, Bob Proulx, joined Health Industry Hub to discuss a new form of medical imaging for the early and non-invasive detection of cancer. The highly sensitive and biosafe MagSense technology, currently in early phase clinical trials, has the potential to transform the medical imaging landscape.

Bob Proulx said “Historically, there’s been a big gap between screening tools, such as mammograms or blood based tests like PSA, and the actual cancer diagnosis. Up till now diagnosis has always required a biopsy…to determine whether it’s cancerous tissue or not. Imaging technologies have tried to fill that gap but whether it’s CT, MRI, X-ray or ultrasound, they can give you good visualisation of the tissue, but they can’t tell you with what they see whether it is benign or malignant.

“The unmet need is to have the molecular specificity of pathology with an imaging agent. If we can couple cancer specific targeting ligands to imaging agents, now we have a way to say if what I see in the image is actually cancer or not…We’re hoping that we can close that gap by being more molecularly specific with the imaging tools.”

Imagion Biosystems is currently engaged in a Phase I clinical study to validate the safety and efficacy of the MagSense imaging agent for HER2 breast cancer patients in Australia.

Bob added “Having gotten into the clinic to administer our product into breast cancer patients and starting to see real data from real patients has been very encouraging. Now we’ve got evidence that suggests that we need to continue to move forward with this.

“The advances with PET imaging is a positive for us. The markets for molecular imaging are huge. Sharing a piece of that is going to allow us to be successful. Having other companies who are already demonstrating the targeted imaging…suggests that the commercial adoption and the clinical adoption is going to be on its way.”