Polartechnics promises more accurate cervical screen

A cervical screening product that its developer claims is more accurate than the conventional pap smear in detecting earlier grades of pre-cancer will be on the European market within the next few months, and in Australia by the end of the year.

Sydney-based company Polartechnics has announced positive results from clinical trials of its cervical cancer diagnostic TruScan, carried out in Australia and Europe.

And the company has signed a deal with Olympus Australia to distribute MediScan, a new optical medical imaging device to be rolled out in the next few months in Australia and New Zealand. MediScan will assist gynaecologists with the cervical tissue classification system that underlies TruScan).

Polartechnics CEO Alan Holton said TruScan received European market approval last year.

"This year is the commercialisation stage where we take the product to market," he said.

TruScan will be launched in Italy first, then in Australia. The plan is to broaden the market to include more European countries and later focus on US market approval.

More clinical data is being gathered to demonstrate the efficacy of TruScan to the European market, Holton said: "We will also have to do more clinical trials to get approval in the US."

He said the cervical screening product would be used as an adjunct to the pap smear until gynaecologists were satisfied with the product.

"Anyone who does a pap smear will be able to use it," Holton said. "The cervix gets brushed for a minute and the indicators tells the doctor whether he has struck diseased tissue."

The company claims that TruScan provides instantaneous results and causes less discomfort to patients.

To help gynaecologists to interpret the results, MediScan takes the images from TruScan and stores them and allows doctors to go back and look at results more closely.

"We developed this (MediScan) system in-house after the doctors told us they needed it," Holton said.

Clinical trials from more than 750 patients have shown Polartechnics' product to be more effective than a pap smear in detecting earlier grades of pre-cancer, the company said. It also substantially reduced the false negative rate in both low and high grade pre-cancers.

"The probe has electrodes and optical fibres to pick up changes on the cervix and we get a mathematical equation that tells the user whether the tissue is diseased or not," Holton said.

"We hope that one day that our cervical screening product will replace the pap smear."

Last year, Polartechnics launched its SolarScan probe for skin cancer detection in Australia. The company specialises in inventions based on a biophysical platform using opto-electronic measurements of human tissue interpreted through specially designed algorithms.