December 2019 - First positive clinical results on cancer detection by 4D Lifetest™
In November 2019, we successfully started our clinical study to validate 4D Lifetest™ as a Liquid Biopsy method for the early detection of cancer. For this study, which initially focusses on prostate cancer and lung cancer, we were able to attract two of the most renowned cancer centres in Switzerland, St. Clara Hospital (Basel) and Kantonsspital (St. Gallen). We chose prostate cancer and lung cancer as first applications because they are very different in their aggressiveness and survival rates. This gives us a very good opportunity to optimize and generalize our clinical standard protocol for our assay and to begin to evaluate its general screening potential.
We are very pleased to inform you that in December 2019 we were able to perform the first tests with patients suffering from prostate cancer. These initial feasibility tests have demonstrated that 4D Lifetest™ is definitely able to distinguish cancer patients from healthy controls. As a consequence, our scientific hypothesis on the diagnostic performance of our Liquid Biopsy assay (see fig. 1) has now been confirmed for the first time in clinical application (see fig. 2 and 3). After the in vitro Proof of Technology (see 4D Lifetec Newsletter September 2019 edition), these first results confirm our conviction that the 4D Lifetest™ will soon reach the next important milestone, the clinical Proof of Concept. We are now in the process of statistically validating the results with more patients and optimizing the clinical standard protocol for the assay.