Our Vision
Invivoscribe is committed to improving the quality of healthcare worldwide, providing high quality, reliable, cutting-edge tools for molecular diagnostics and personalized molecular medicine.
"Minimal residual disease (MRD) tests — highly sensitive patient-specific tests that target the antigen receptor genes — are an example of tests Invivoscribe's subsidiary, LabPMM uses to monitor patient therapy. These tests quantify cancer cells in patients who have achieved remission, providing an 'early warning' on cancer recurrence. Oncology tests such as these are analogous to the infectious disease tests such as HIV viral load assays that are currently used to identify when the virus has evolved or mutated so that the 'cocktail' of antiviral drugs are no longer effective. These MRD tests are already fulfilling the promise of personalized molecular medicine."
SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
The potential of the revolutionary field of personalized molecular diagnostics is rapidly gaining wide acceptance. We are starting to see more of a cooperative approach as drugs and molecular diagnostic tools are used together to guide treatment. Biomarker testing is used more and more frequently to stratify and monitor disease, aid in treatment decisions, and identify targeted therapies for each individual patient. This coherent, logical strategy is becoming a Standard of Care in oncology. Tests such as Invivoscribe's FLT3 Mutation test are fulfilling the promise of personalized molecular medicine. We think that personalized molecular medicine will help clinicians make informed treatment decisions, help accelerate drug development, and ultimately lower the cost of heathcare.
It is clear that molecular diagnostics has the very real potential to achieve many of the promises of personalized medicine, perhaps even providing a means to control escalating healthcare costs. As the field of molecular diagnostics matures and evolves, we are confident that molecular techniques will help predict disease, so that, combined with patient education, there will be earlier intervention and more emphasis on preventive medicine.
However, there are data that indicate that we may not have to wait long to achieve both cost savings and improvement in patient outcome from molecular medicine involving the FLT3 biomarker. For example, 20-30% of patients with acute myeloid leukemia have mutations of the FLT3 biomarker that could make them eligible for several FLT3-targeted small molecule therapies that are currently in late stage clinical trials. Interim results from these clinical studies indicate that FLT3-targeted drugs may improve survival and obviate the need for allogeneic stem cell transplantation. If results such as these are confirmed and one or more of these FLT3-targeted drugs become approved by the FDA, testing for the FLT3 biomarker may eliminate the need for thousands of patients to undergo stem cell transplantation (allogeneic transplants cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and transplants place recipients at grave risk of infection and other complications such as Graft vs. Host disease). Accordingly, the companion diagnostic FLT3 diagnostic test will provide access to the FLT3 small molecular inhibitor, which could result in improved survival coupled with cost savings of tens of thousands of dollars per AML patient. As there are more than thirty thousand new AML patients identified each year, this could result in hundreds of millions of dollars per year in potential cost savings. Further, as these targeted therapies generally have substantively reduced side effects relative to those of standard chemotherapy, the quality of life for the patient is potentially much improved.
Molecular diagnostics is the avenue to achieve personalized medicine. Clinical information other than molecular testing only gets you so far; to achieve the promise of personalized medicine, you really need to stratify and define disease at the molecular level. Invivoscribe and its subsidiaries have invested substantial resources, in capital equipment, research and development funding, intellectual property, and regulatory and standardization processes, to ensure that we can completely investigate and understand the changes that occur in biomarkers at the molecular level in response to drug treatment and therapy. Targeted identification of specific biomarkers is critical to patient management, to controlling costs, and to providing the right drug, to the right patient, at the right dose, at the right time.
