Tamarisc Diagnostics

OVERVIEW

65 million pap smears were conducted in 2006. Roughly ten percent of these tissue collections are diagnosed irregular and go into reflex molecular testing. Cervical cancer is the main reason for pap smear screening but in 2005, there were 500,000 new cases of cervical cancer worldwide, and 260,000 women died of cervical cancer. According to the Center for Disease control, Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the cause of cervical cancer. Eighty percent of all women greater than fifty years of age encounter HPV; it is the common cold of sexually transmitted diseases. Currently, only one test is FDA approved for molecular diagnosis of HPV; however, it does not give needed strain specific results. Thirteen strains out of over one hundred are responsible for most cervical cancers. Therefore, many lives would be saved if treatment was given with the knowledge of whether the specific strain a patient had was highly cancerous. To this end, Tamarisc is engineering a molecular diagnostic device that performs strain specific HPV analysis in a fraction of the current time needed to obtain patient results. In doing so, this will enable doctors to isolate potentially debilitating diseases, save lives, and improve patient care.

A specialized probe binds DNA sequence-specifically during a reaction of our proprietary Hybrid-Energy Transfer assay.