Oxford BioDynamics offers the EpiSwitch™ platform for the development of tests aimed at monitoring patients with cancer. The platform is easily scalable and automatable to allow turnover and throughput tailored for the local requirements of health-care service providers around the world.
Patient monitoring is a common routine, which can be applied to determining the progress of disease, a patient’s response to treatment, or the likelihood of recurrence. A significant advantage of this approach is that patients who are asymptomatic or have localised tumours may avoid unnecessary treatment, and such ‘active surveillance’ is common in prostate cancer patients.
Rapid advances in the field of molecular biology allow for a number of more specific and sensitive biomarker tests such as EpiSwitch™ to be developed, providing more accurate and reliable measures of cancer status. Unlike the common methods for monitoring, which may involve invasive, painful, and unreliable methods, the EpiSwitch™ test can detect over-expressed tumour markers in the blood of tested individuals and thus provides a rapid and effective means for patients monitoring.
