Europe Grants Pacific Edge Patent For Colorectal Cancer Prognostic Technology

The European Intellectual Property Office which operates across 38 countries including all European Union members, has awarded Pacific Edge a patent for its colorectal cancer prognostic technology.

Pacific Edge Chief Executive Officer David Darling says the issue of the patent is a further step for the Company by providing intellectual property protection in all members of the European Union plus Switzerland, Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, Norway, Iceland, Serbia and Macedonia. Colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in males and the second in females worldwide, with over 1.2 million new cases and 608,700 deaths estimated to have occurred in 2008.

"Currently our focus is on accelerating the roll-out of the Company's first commercial molecular diagnostic test, Cxbladder Detect, in the USA, the world's largest health care market. As milestones are attained there, the opportunity to launch the Cxbladder system into other markets and bring to market further developments of our intellectual property, such as our colorectal cancer technology, become attractive.

The incidence of colorectal cancer is increasing in many countries and this has been attributed to changing lifestyles and diets.

Pacific Edge's colorectal cancer prognostic technology is targeted to enable the detection of aggressive cancer in patients already diagnosed with colorectal cancer. This prognostic test in development is expected to provide clinicians with a significantly improved opportunity to determine the aggressiveness of Stage II and Stage III colorectal cancer. The test results will enable physicians to predict progression and provide patients with a more specific treatment following surgery.

Pacific Edge's colorectal cancer prognostic gene signature is in development and on completion will become another commercial product for the Company, joining the Cx family as Cxcolorectal.

Presently, patients with Stage II disease are generally not treated with adjuvant chemotherapy as it is not possible to identify the subset of patients who will have the aggressive disease. In the five major European countries, the USA and Japan, approximately 430,000 individuals are diagnosed with colorectal cancer every year. Of those diagnosed cases approximately 280,000 patients are diagnosed with Stage II and Stage III progressions of the cancer. Approximately 30% of the patients with Stage II and roughly 50% of those with Stage III experience disease progression including distant metastasis of the liver and lung or local recurrence within three to five years after surgery. If the cancer spreads to distant organs, the five-year survival rate for these patients is approximately 8%, making the early detection of those patients with an aggressive disease a significant medical opportunity for clinicians and patients. Cxcolorectal, when completed and launched in the market, will provide clinicians with a valuable tool to help identify those patients at greatest risk who will then be able to be more appropriately targeted for adjuvant chemotherapy in addition to surgery.