EKF Diagnostics’ PointMan technology achieves cancer breakthrough

EKF Diagnostics has announced a new breakthrough from a cancer research collaboration with Swansea University that made use of its PointMan DNA enrichment technology.

The enrichment products have been used by the university's Institute of Life Sciences to analyse the whole blood of cancer patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, enabling the identification of gene mutations associated with response to drug treatment.

Results observed for mutations in the BRAF gene were consistent with formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue samples, the laboratory standard method to prepare all biopsy samples for pathology review in order to diagnose this cancer.

This is illustrative of the potential for PointMan to enable the use of a blood sample to assess the mutation status of cancer patients.

Julian Baines, chief executive officer of EKF, said: "This is a major step forward, not just for the company but also for the future testing of cancer patients, where we hope that less-invasive testing will become routine using our PointMan technology."

This comes after the company introduced four new PointMan DNA enrichment kits at the Association for Molecular Pathology annual meeting in November 2013.