Pancreatic cancer is the deadliest of cancers with just one in nine patients surviving five years after diagnosis. The low rate of survival largely results from the late stage at which the cancer is first detected, as 65% patients are not diagnosed until the disease has metastasized. Bluestar Genomics Inc. hopes it has developed an assay that can detect the cancer much sooner, allowing patients and their physicians to get ahead of the malignancy well before it spreads.
Despite wide availability and coverage for colonoscopy, many patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer (CRC) have never undergone the recommended screening procedure for the malignancy and its precursors. As a result, the cancer has already spread in the majority of cases at the time of diagnosis. CRC remains the third most common cancer diagnosed in the U.S. and the second leading cause of cancer death for both men and women.
Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., in part because many cases aren’t diagnosed until they are advanced. Bluestar Genomics Inc. wants to change that with its epigenomics technology which can detect early pancreatic cancer from a standard blood draw by analyzing cell-free DNA in plasma. Now, the FDA has provided a bump, granting breakthrough device designation to Bluestar’s noninvasive pancreatic cancer detection test in patients with new-onset diabetes. According to the San Diego-based startup, of an estimated 60,000 patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the U.S., nearly a fourth are found to have new-onset diabetes prior to receiving their cancer diagnosis.
Bluestar Genomics Inc. and the University of Chicago revealed the publication of a genome-wide 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) map across multiple human tissue types. In the report, published Dec. 2, 2020, in Nature Communications, the researchers detailed the development of the map by characterizing the genomic distributions of 5hmC in 19 human tissues derived from 10 organ systems.
Bluestar Genomics Inc. identified DNA-based epigenomic changes that could be used as new biomarkers that can detect pancreatic cancer before the malignancy, one of the deadliest of all cancers, becomes untreatable. The study was published in Nature Communications.
