About Previstage™ GCC Colorectal Cancer Staging Test for Healthcare Professionals
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The Previstage™ GCC Colorectal Cancer Staging Test is a laboratory-developed test. It was developed and its characteristics were determined by DiagnoCure Oncology Laboratories.
Previstage™ GCC is a new molecular test for colorectal cancer staging. Every year in North America, 174,000 people are diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and 142,000 colorectal cancer surgeries are performed. Staging a patient with colorectal cancer is crucial because it determines the patient’s course of treatment after the surgery. Current standard of care requires that pathologists microscopically examine a thin slice of tissue from each of the lymph nodes harvested during the patient's surgery to see if cancer has spread. Currently, up to 30 percent of patients with no pathologically-positive lymph nodes (stage I and II cancers) later develop recurrent disease, presumably through rectal or colon cancer cells that were missed using the microscope method, which resulted in an underestimation of the risk of recurrence. Most of these patients do not receive additional therapies such as chemotherapy. With a detection capacity that is close to 100,000 x more sensitive than microscopic methods, Previstage™ GCC provides clinicians with significantly more accurate information for staging a patient with colorectal cancer that will increase their confidence in making critical treatment decisions.
The relation between GCC (GUCY2C, guanylyl cyclase C) and colorectal cancer was discovered in the early 1990’s by Dr. Scott Waldman at Thomas Jefferson University. In 2008, Dr. Waldman concluded a 5-year multicenter clinical study sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health on the detection of GCC in lymph nodes to assess the risk of rectal or colon cancer recurrence in patients. His results strongly support the prognostic value of GCC testing and show that patients with GCC positive lymph nodes are 4.7 times more likely to develop disease recurrence than GCC negative patients. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in February 2009.
In an educational session held during the 2009 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium (ASCO GI) which reviewed different markers for colorectal cancer prognosis, it was suggested that patients with GCC positive lymph nodes could be considered as stage III patients. Click here for the presentation >>
