Rapid, Point-of-Care Screening of Biopsies for Pre-Cancer of the Gastrointestinal Tract

In 2012, 1.4 million biopsy procedures were performed to test for cancer in NHS England alone. Each procedure generates typically between 4 and 40 biopsies, each of which must undergo histological examination. Depending on the cancer type, between 90 and 99% of these biopsies are healthy or do not indicate the need for further intervention. The large number of biopsies entering the pathology lab leads to a delay in return of diagnoses by 2-4
weeks and costs NHS England over £600 million per year.
Increased time to diagnosis has been associated with poorer survival, greater disease/treatmentrelated morbidity and adverse psychological adjustment. Oesophageal adenocarcinoma (OAC) and colorectal adenocarcinoma (CAC) are two examples of cancers associated with high mortality, primarily due to late stage diagnosis. Approximately 230,000 cases of OAC were diagnosed globally in 2012 and CAC is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in
Europe. To improve the detection of early stage disease there are national screening programmes of high risk individuals for each of these diseases. Screening and diagnosis of these diseases generates a large number of biopsies.
BeamLine Diagnostics have designed an innovative tool which will function as a rapid pointof-care system to screen biopsies for pre-cancer in the GI tract and drastically reduce the number of biopsies sent on to pathology.