Diagnostics
Background
According to American Cancer Society, more than 1,660,000 people were diagnosed with cancer in 2013 alone. More than 70% of these patients will be treated with DNA damaging agents as part of their therapy. A current limitation of these treatments is the inability of oncologists to rapidly and accurately assess if a patient will respond favorably or poorly to these treatments. Red 5 Pharmaceuticals, LLC is developing new technologies to overcome this urgent clinical problem.
Invention
Our lead product is the KRun™ Kit, which combines patient samples (blood, serum or tumor biopsy) with our patented chemicals in a plastic 96-well plate which is then run on standard equipment found in any hospital or research lab. Results generated from the KRunTM kit will provide important indicators to determine if a patient will respond favorably or unfavorably to specific chemotherapy drugs. This “personalized chemotherapy” will allow oncologists to predict patient responses to their individualized chemotherapy prior to initiation, greatly improving the potential for a beneficial response. Equally important, the KRunTM platform will provide oncologists with essential information to make rapid clinical decisions (<24 hrs). This rapid time frame will significantly improve patient response to therapeutic intervention compared to current state of the art, where patients need to wait 2-4 months to find out if their chemotherapy was successful. We anticipate that the KRunTM kit will be marketed to oncologists, academic research institutions, and animal contract labs that evaluate patients or research animal response to chemotherapy.
