Company
Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in American women, claiming more than 41,000 lives each year. Many women at high risk live with constant worry. Once a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, it never leaves her side even if it is in remission. Providing an alternative to fear in the form of more accurate, reliable tests for the detection and monitoring of breast cancer is what drives Matrix-Bio to excel in the emerging field of metabolite profiling.
With early detection, breast cancer is highly treatable and survivable. Yet current diagnostic procedures yield too many false positives, resulting in costly, unnecessary and painful biopsies. Founded in 2006, Matrix-Bio is an Indiana-based life science company focused on the development and commercialization of advanced metabolite profiling-based blood tests for early cancer detection, recurrence detection, and therapy monitoring that offer greater accuracy than current testing methodologies.
Led by company founder and chief scientific officer Daniel Raftery, Matrix-Bio has developed an advanced metabolite profiling platform technology that enables simple, yet highly accurate tests for early-stage cancer diagnosis, recurrence monitoring, and tracking the effects of chemotherapy while therapy is in progress. Specifically, the company has combined advanced methods in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS), the "gold standards" for analyzing biomarkers in blood and urine. The resulting patent-pending technology enables the identification of biomarkers that indicate early-stage breast cancer and its recurrence after therapy. The sensitivity and specificity of Matrix-Bio's tests, which rely on blood rather than tissue samples, is significantly greater than current detection and monitoring tests, including mammography. By accurately and reliably detecting cancer at an early, more treatable stage, patients and their physicians have more treatment options, a better prognosis and the peace of mind this knowledge provides.
Matrix-Bio's MetaMarker-BCR test for breast cancer recurrence monitoring and MetaMarker-BCD test for early detection have the potential to be the first commercially available, metabolite-based tests for breast cancer in the world. The non-invasive nature of these tests, coupled with accuracy, reliability, cost, convenience and speed, will drive demand among patients, physicians and payers.
Matrix-Bio's goal is to be a leading provider of metabolite-based testing in the fast-growing molecular diagnostic testing market. While the company's initial focus is breast cancer, its novel technology shows great potential for detecting and monitoring several deadly cancers and other important diseases.