My client, the world leading biomarker validation company, Abcodia, is marking November’s Lung and Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month by offering access to longitudinal serum samples for organizations and academic teams seeking to validate their biomarkers to improve early detection and screening for these two devastating diseases.

Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide, and although around 1.2 million people develop the disease each year, only around 16% of these are diagnosed early enough to cure. There is currently no approved biomarkers for lung cancer.

Tragically, the demographics of pancreatic cancer have not changed in 30 years; the five year survival rate is less than 4% and the median survival rate is less than six months. Working with UCL, Abcodia has evaluated the performance of the current diagnostic marker, CA19-9 in all its pancreatic cancer cases, together with a large number of healthy controls for up to three years prior to diagnosis. The longitudinal profile is fascinating and anyone interested in seeing these data should get in touch. Abcodia is now looking to identify additional markers to improve on the performance of CA 19-9 for early detection and screening in high risk groups.

Crucially, while cancer screening has been shown to save lives and extend survival in other cancers, research is hampered by the lack of quality pre-diagnosis samples. Abcodia, with its exclusive commercial licence to the UKCTOCS prospective serum biobank generated by UCL, is uniquely positioned to address this problem through its access to more than 2,000 samples from lung and pancreatic cancer patients. Many of these samples have been donated by the same person over several years which allows for within-patient studies to be conducted.

Abcodia  can also provide significant demographic and phenotypic data for each volunteer, including details on their age, ethnicity and crucial lifestyle factors, such as smoking and alcohol consumption.

Access is offered to both commercial and not-for-profit institutions. Abcodia is passionate about helping to bring about early diagnosis of these two devastating cancers. For further details about their work with lung cancer, please read here, and for pancreatic cancer, please read here.