The objective of the OneRNA4Bladder project is to save lives and reduce cost of care for bladder cancer treatment – the most expensive kind of cancer to treat due to expensive diagnostic procedures and ineffective drugs, leading to recurrence rates of up to 70%. This objective is achieved by integrating 3 technologies to completely redefine the management of bladder cancer by:
1) Substituting the use of cystoscopy with the OneRNA4Bladder for the detection of bladder cancer recurrence;
2) Validating the OneRNA™ platform’s ability to predict responders to current standard of care and the newly approved checkpoint inhibitors;
3) Developing data to support the use of the OneRNA4Bladder system as a liquid biopsy platform (e.g. measuring signals for response to treatment)
Bladder cancer is the 6th most common cancer with an estimated 357,000 new cases worldwide every year, of which 180,000 are European. The high incidence, coupled with it’s relapsing nature, results in the highest lifetime treatment costs per patient of all cancers. A significant part of this cost burden stems from routine use of highly invasive and expensive procedures, such as cystoscopy, in diagnosis and recurrence testing.
Substituting routine cystoscopy with the OneRNA4Bladder system could cut the cost of diagnosis and managing bladder cancer in half. In Europe the cost of diagnosing bladder cancer is €1.8 billion/year, thus European Healthcare payers could save €900 million/year. Perhaps even most striking, the costs associated with an untimely death due to bladder cancer (i.e. the ‘‘value’’ of life lost) approach €7 billion annually. OneRNA4Bladder is expected to significantly minimize bladder cancer burden.
The high bladder cancer recurrence rate can be interpreted as simply lack of effective treatment. Genomic Expression has developed a way to sequence RNA fast and inexpensively and link the statistically changes to drugs that could provide more durable response. This technology is called OneRNA™. In OneRNA4Bladder, OneRNA™ will be deployed as a liquid biopsy platform to effectively measure response, recurrence and provide insight into novel treatment options.
