Diagnostics company Diaceutics has commercially launched its €26 million DXRX precision medicine platform which it hopes will improve the efficiency of patient testing for a range of diseases.
The Belfast-based company aims to reduce a timeline for a patient to secure optimal treatment for his or her condition. At present this can take years: Diaceutics hopes to reduce it to months.
Chief executive Peter Keeling sees the DXRX platform as a solution for a "broken ecosystem", bringing together stakeholders from across the industry to collaborate in a marketplace to solve real-world testing issues in a secure standardised way for patients.
Using lung cancer as an example, he says a patient will take on average four years to go from their initial consultation to being treated with the latest generation therapies, a process that might see them undergo 10 different sets of tests.
“When you look at that diagnostic journey we see lots of wasted opportunities to find those patients earlier and intervene earlier, because we all know that the earlier you get them on the right therapy the better the outcomes,” he said. “This is really about triaging patients through the system faster.”
Own silos
Part of the problem, he says, is that there is little co-ordination, with clinicians and laboratories all working within their own silos.
DXRX integrates a pipeline of anonymised global diagnostic testing data into one secure platform, providing access to transparent, real-time reporting on diagnostic utilisation at a local level across multiple therapeutic areas.
The platform, says Mr Keeling, shows everybody what the data is saying, how long the diagnostic journey is in the real world. It can allow labs and companies to collaborate on how that might be done better and more quickly “to improve the triaging of such patients”.
“No other platform globally allows this to happen. Speed is of the essence in medicine, especially in cancer. The majority of the really good weapons are used when the cancer is in the very late stage. And that is unnecessary, and it is not because treatments cannot work earlier but because you cannot find or confirm those patients.”
Cancer is not the only therapy area being targeted by Diaceutics with its platform. Mr Keeling says the data on the platform can also help with infectious diseases, autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis and also cardiovascular disease.
The is a huge amount of room to improve life with existing technology by using it more efficiently,” he says. That, he argues, is what the DXRX platform allows laboratories and other parts of the healthcare sector to do.
Standard
Already the platform is live in 38 laboratories and diagnostic companies across the EU, Asia and the US. The company says it is working with leading service providers in 51 countries.
"We believe that DXRX sets a new industry standard for precision medicine which, until today, has been reliant upon a business model entirely unfit for purpose," said Sarah Colgan, Diaceutics head of global marketing.
“There is a better way to get every patient the treatment they deserve. We believe that DXRX is that way.”
