Veracyte, a molecular diagnostics company, recently announced an agreement to acquire Allegro Diagnostics Corp., a company that develops genomic tests for a preoperative diagnosis of lung-cancer, a decision that may allow the company to enter in the pulmonology market by 2015, with the launch of a new lung cancer test.
According to the information provided by Veracyte, Allegro’s lung cancer test helps to assess which patients with lung nodules who have had a non-diagnostic bronchoscopy result have low risk to develop cancer and, therefore, can be monitored with CT scans instead of other invasive procedures.
Allegro’s lung cancer test, taken on cytology samples obtained from bronchoscopy, is able to detect molecular changes and the presence of malignancy in the respiratory airways that are correlated with disease.
Veracyte’s decision to acquire Allegro will allow the first to fulfill the plans of fastening its entrance on the pulmonology market, suggested Bonnie H. Anderson, president and chief executive officer through the company’s released information, adding that Allegro test will enable the company not only to “improve care for patients with lung nodules,” but also “to resolve diagnostic ambiguity preoperatively.” This can be a way of avoiding more invasive procedures and also of reducing healthcare costs, Anderson explained.
Michael D. Webb, president and chief executive officer of Allegro Diagnostics, appears to agree . He explained that this union between the two companies allows them to reach more patients and, consequently, to help reduce “unnecessary diagnostic surgeries and other procedures among the hundreds of thousands of patients with lung nodules who undergo bronchoscopies each year in the U.S to rule out cancer.”
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death by cancer in the U.S., with about 160,000 deaths per year.
From the approximately 250,000 bronchoscopies done every year, about 40 percent of lung nodule patients who go through surgery are found to have benign nodules.
