Prometheus Presents Proprietary Oncology Diagnostic Platform at ASCO Annu...( New Product Names for Recently Introd...),Health

New Product Names for Recently Introduced MicroRNA-based Diagnostics Also Unveiled

SAN DIEGO, June 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Prometheus Laboratories Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostic company, presented an overview of its proprietary oncology diagnostic platform yesterday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Orlando.

In a presentation entitled "Profiling of Receptor Tyrosine Kinases (RTK) Activation in Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) in Metastatic Tumors Using Proximity Mediated Microarray Immunoassay," Prometheus demonstrated that its novel microarray platform can successfully detect the activation of key cancer pathways EGFR and HER2 in CTCs isolated from blood samples of patients with high specificity and sensitivity as high as a single cell. Testing of samples from frozen breast cancer tissues demonstrated concordance between reported HER2 status based on immunohistochemistry (IHC), a commonly used biopsy-based method, and the Prometheus diagnostic platform. Further, an analysis of CTCs from metastatic breast cancer patients showed that more than 50% of patients with HER2 negative primary tumors had CTCs with activated HER2 and approximately 30% of these patients had both activated and amplified HER2 over time. A copy of the presentation can be found on the Company's website at www.prometheuslabs.com.

"As our understanding of molecular targets and cancer pathways increases, so too does our need for sophisticated diagnostics," said Henry Pan, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Scientific and Medical Officer of Prometheus. "We believe the sensitivity and specificity of our proprietary diagnostics may help oncologists to optimize the choice of a growing number of targeted therapies for breast, lung, colorectal and other cancers. In addition, we believe the ability to isolate CTCs from whole blood and fine needle aspirates
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