Partnership will enable women in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Myanmar to access the benefits of MammaPrint® and BluePrint® to personalize treatment management decisions for early breast cancer
Agendia, Inc., a world leader in personalized medicine and molecular cancer diagnostics, and Angsana Molecular & Diagnostics Laboratory Pte Ltd, a subsidiary of Parkway Pantai, announce a partnership to market the MammaPrint® Breast Cancer Risk of Recurrence test and the BluePrint® Molecular Subtyping test to physicians across Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Myanmar.
Under the terms of the agreement, physicians in these markets can now send their patients’ samples, via Angsana, for testing at Agendia’s CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited laboratory in Irvine, California.
MammaPrint analyzes 70 genes most associated with breast cancer recurrence and provides a binary result to identify women with early-stage breast cancer who are at a genomic Low or High Risk for distant metastasis within five years.
BluePrint analyzes 80-genes which classify breast cancer into functional molecular subtypes, each with marked differences in long-term outcome and response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
These tests provide essential information to aid physicians in making informed and personalized treatment management decisions which can reduce the risk of potential overtreatment and the associated side effects to provide the best outcome for that patient.
Dr Daniel Tan, Chief Executive Officer, Angsana Molecular & Diagnostics Laboratory said: “Breast cancer makes up almost one-third of all cancers diagnosed among women in Singapore and Malaysia. Importantly, more than two-thirds of these cases are discovered at an early stage, where survival rates are significantly higher. MammaPrint helps to empower these early stage breast cancer patients by providing extra genomic information, enabling them and their oncologists to make informed, confident decisions about their treatment, and avoiding the side-effects of unnecessary chemotherapy. The test can also help to reduce the patient’s overall treatment costs, making valuable medical resources available for other patients.”
The scale of the potential quality of life and cost-effectiveness benefits of MammaPrint were demonstrated in the landmark MINDACT trial published in 2016.
MINDACT found that almost 50 percent of patients initially identified as at high risk of their cancer recurring using clinical and pathological factors and therefore candidates for chemotherapy, were in fact low risk according to the MammaPrint test and unlikely to benefit from it.
Based on a review of the findings of this trial, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) published a dedicated update to its breast cancer clinical practice guidelines in July 2017.
It named MammaPrint as the only test of its kind recommended to inform treatment decisions for both lymph node-positive and lymph node-negative breast cancer patients.
MammaPrint is also included in other important international oncology practice guidelines including the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), the St. Gallen Breast Cancer Consensus.
