Exciting clinical data in Prostate Cancer
24th November 2022
LAUSANNE, Switzerland, SamanTree Medical, a medical technology company driven to support clinicians with their intraoperative decisions and improve cancer surgery outcomes, announced today the publication of clinical data in prostate cancer, expanding the potential clinical utility of its proprietary medical imaging platform, the Histolog Scanner.
Morphological information is the gold standard guidance for clinicians in cancer surgery allowing the visualization of microscopic cancer lesions, however, the time required to get the results is a limiting factor to its widespread and routine use (Dobbs et al., 2013; Elfgen et al., 2019). Accurate intraoperative assessment is especially important in prostate cancer, where nerve-sparing surgery can avoid impotency and urinary incontinency that may affect many of the patients (Dinneen et al., 2019). Such surgery implies however leaving nerves surrounding the prostate intact while removing as much cancer as possible, representing a potential site for recurrences if cancer has invaded them.
The Enclosure Study was conducted at Canisius Wilhelmina Hospital (Netherlands), under the supervision of Professor Diederik Somford and Dr. Willem Vreuls. The study evaluated the Histolog Scanner as an alternative to NeuroSAFE. “Surgeons are most of the time guided with preoperative MRI, which does not enable cellular visualization of the nerve-adjacent areas of the prostate, resulting in 20-40% positive margins found by final pathology examination following surgery. The current best practice to avoid the risk of positive margins is to perform frozen sections of the nerve-adjacent structures of the prostate, a procedure called NeuroSAFE. This procedure requires time and resources, limiting its standardization amongst hospitals. Enclosure study shows the relevance of the information provided by the Histolog Scanner resulting in similar performance to NeuroSAFE procedure, however with 80% time reduction”, explained Dr. Willem Vreuls.
Charles S. Carignan, MD, SamanTree Medical Chairman commented, “as already announced in our previous press release, the Histolog Scanner is a multi-purpose imaging platform compatible with multiple clinical routine, for faster and safer oncological treatment. With its large field of view and high resolution, the Histolog Scanner provides a unique opportunity to standardize intraoperative assessment in indications where morphologic information cannot be obtained in a time-efficient, cost-effective manner, such as prostate. The numbers speak for themselves; the Histolog Scanner was shown to provide the gold standard information in 5 minutes instead of 45. In cases where frozen sections are performed as intraoperative assessment, the Histolog Scanner provides surgeons and pathologists with a faster communication channel while keeping the microscopic resolution. Another demonstration of that will be published early 2023 with the utilization of our platform in brain cancer.”
Access the full press release here