Breast Cancer Diagnostics: Start-Ups Look To Fill Gaps In The Patient Care Continuum

A woman born in the US today has a one in eight chance of developing invasive breast cancer during her lifetime. Each year approximately 230,000 new cases are diagnosed and more than 39,000 die from the disease, putting it in second place behind lung cancer as a top cause of cancer deaths for women, according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute. On the positive side, mortality from breast cancer in the US and other industrialized countries has been decreasing at approximately 2.2% per year since 1990, thanks to advances in adjuvant therapy and the increasing use of screening mammography. More than 39 million mammograms will be performed in the US in 2011. Two-dimensional (2D) screen film and full-field digital mammography (FFDM) are the gold standard technologies used in breast cancer screening, with FFDM now being used in approximately 82% of US centers, up from 20% in 2006, according to the latest Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA) statistics. Despite mammo being a mature and successful diagnostic technology, in use for over 40 years, there is much room for improvement to address its drawbacks, which include high false-negative and false-positive rates, the use of ionizing radiation, and ineffectiveness in dense or scarred breast tissue.

On the therapeutic side, there is also much room for innovation. Reoperation rates as high as 49% after early-stage breast...