A Centennial-based company is developing a cancer-screening technology that it says will be cheaper, more effective and more widely available than existing procedures.
CellPoint has been developing the technology — an imaging agent that is injected into a patient and makes cancer cells visible with a medical scanner — for more than a decade.
The company hit an important milestone in March, when the Food and Drug Administration approved a Phase 3 clinical study of the agent, called EC-G, for lung cancer. The results could lead to FDA approval.
“Right now we are looking at a 2013 commercialization,” said Terry Colip, a founder and chief financial officer of CellPoint.
According to Colip and his colleagues, EC-G has the potential to broaden the market for cancer screening.
Current technology relies on PET cameras, which cost about $3 million each and are found mainly in hospitals in major urban areas, Colip said. CellPoint’s technology uses SPECT cameras that cost about $500,000 and are in almost every U.S. hospital.
Screenings using EC-G would then be a fraction of the cost of traditional ones, he said.
“If you are a medical director, are you going to approve an agent that costs from $2,500 to $3,500 or are you going to approve something that costs $500 to $800? … It’s a no-brainer,” said Dr. Wayne Yakes, a radiologist and founder of the Vascular Malformation Center at Swedish Medical Center. “First, it can be done anywhere. Second, it is very inexpensive and doesn’t add to our health-care costs to deliver high-end care.”
Yakes said he didn’t hesitate to join CellPoint’s board of advisers when the company asked him.
CellPoint acquired the worldwide rights for EC-G a decade ago from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
. Colip said in the intervening years, CellPoint has reformulated the agent. The company has four managing partners and 65 contract employees in the U.S.
CellPoint is in a Phase 2 clinical study of its imaging agent for diagnosing patients with coronary-artery disease.
Dr. David Schrier, an oncologist at Mile High Oncology, said the CellPoint imaging agent is a potential breakthrough that will help patients and doctors.
“The product would be very sensitive, less expensive and widely available,” he said, adding, “Some patients who get a PET scan … get a false positive because the test is not as sensitive. It causes people to order more tests. It is an emotional roller coaster. So it is medically and emotionally expensive.”
Colip said that when the lung and coronary-artery-disease trials are completed, CellPoint will have spent more than $100 million. The company has raised funds from private and corporate investors such as Dutch industrial giant Philips and from licensing revenues.
