Addressing the Point-of-Care

POC Medical Systems™ Inc. is a California based company founded in 2013 by Sanjeev Saxena and his team of highly experienced technology and biomedical engineering professionals. It engages in the development of breast cancer screening tool for diagnosis. It develops Point-Of-Care testing that is performed near the site of the patient for timely response in patient care. The company’s mission is to make cancer and infectious disease screening accessible and affordable on a worldwide basis. Its technology platform resolves two key issues in modern medical diagnostics: geographic inaccessibility and cost prohibition. The company’s vision with the technology platform is to help save millions of lives through early stage screening and detection, and in turn, significantly reduce medical treatment costs. The Pandora CDx™ testing device was developed by POC Medical Systems on a microfluidic platform for rapid point-of-care screening. It is based on a unique low cost disposable microfluidic disk. The platform is a very simple and easy-to- use system which seeks to replace laboratory ELISA-based screening technology and offers better healthcare screening solutions worldwide. The MammoAlert™ test which has been developed for Breast cancer, generates a point-of-care screening result in approximately 30 minutes. The test employs a mobile device (i.e., portable tablet) that stores the test data securely in the cloud, where it can then be shared remotely with doctors and healthcare systems. The test detects multiple cancer biomarkers from a drop of blood using advanced CD microfluidics that applies sophisticated algorithms to produce the screening result. Globally, breast cancer is the highest prevalence, accounting for 25.1% of all cancers and has the highest mortality rate of all cancers. Based on statistics from GLOBOCON and the World Health Organization, there are approximately 2.5 million new cases of Breast cancer annually and approximately half million women die every year. According to the Breast Health Global Initiative, “A key determinant of breast cancer outcome in any population is the degree to which cancers are detected at early stages of disease. Populations in which cancers are detected at earlier stages have lower breast cancer mortality rates.” While breast cancer incidence is higher in developed countries, relative mortality is greatest in less developed countries. In India and China alone, one in seven and one in eight women, respectively, have breast cancer compared to one in ten women in the United States. In India, one in two of the women who get breast cancer die. The lack of early detection is the primary reason for such high mortality rate. However, the challenge to improve survival rate is the lack of availability and accessibility to early diagnostic screening. In many parts of the world, a clinical breast exam remains the only diagnosis tool. This type of exam has tremendously poor clinical results and is limited because of the deep cultural sentiment involving dis-robing of a woman. The potential demand for the MammoAlert test using the Pandora CDx Technology platform is significant based on the potential market opportunities. Today there are more than 1.6 billion women over the age of 40 worldwide of which only about 60 million (less than 4%) are screened. Imagine the MammoAlert test being made readily available to the 1.6 billion women worldwide and the potential impact it would have on improving the survival rate of women with breast cancer. Furthermore, if all women could be screened starting at an early age and hence breast cancer detected early, the treatment costs is much lower which could result in up to 80% savings to the government in places like India, China and Africa where access to screening and treatment are not readily available. However, there is a strong desire by the government of those countries to realize this vision.