Women with breast cancer virtually never die from their primary tumor. Rather, the vast majority – nearly 90 percent – of solid tumor deaths happen because it’s metastasized through the blood, said Oscar Bronsther, CEO of diagnostics company MetaStat.
The company is developing diagnostics for metastatic breast cancer, so physicians can determine whether surgery and local radiation will suffice in therapy – or whether more aggressive therapies are in order. And it’s using a unique epigenetics approach to do so.
“The next generation of diagnostic testing is going to exploit this notion of epigenetics, where environment is almost as important as genetics,” Bronsther said.
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The microcap public company (OTC: MTST) plans to commercialize a suite of breast cancer diagnostics next year, but its platform can extend to gauge the severity of prostate, lung, colon, rectal and stomach cancers. It’s moving its headquarters from Montclair, New Jersey to Cambridge, Massachusetts and is in the process of setting up a CLIA lab.
“So here’s the hook: Only a fraction of tumors are biologically capable of metastasizing,” Bronsther said. “Metastatic disease isn’t something that randomly happens – it’s driven by the biology of the individual tumor.”
In lung cancer, perhaps 90 percent of tumors are metastatic, explaining the high mortality rate of the disease. When looking at breast cancer, only 35 percent of women would develop metastatic disease, he said.
“But we have the ability to provide information to women with 100 percent of beast cancer, regardless of the subtype,” Bronsther said.
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MetaStat’s built around the premise that a common pathway explains how all epithelial-based cancers metastasize, Bronsther said. Here’s where the epigenetics come in: Since 80 percent of solid tumors are epithelial, he said, they likely come from the same origin cell type. The company has studied the tumor microenvironment space, and came up with this:
When a fetus is developing, Bronsther explained, an embryonic protein called the Mena Protein participates in the maturation of the central and peripheral nervous system. Post partum, however, expression of this protein stops. However, all epithelial-based tumors, including metastatic breast cancer, are said to express a lot of the invasive isoform of this Mena protein, he said.
“The principal driver of whether these tumors can metastasize or not is determined by how much of this Mena invasive isoform these tumors produce,” Bronsther said.
The company was formed with the initial plan to develop therapeutics around Mena protein expression levels in metastatic solid tumors. However, the company just spun out its MenaBloc program, Bronsther said, so that the public entity can focus on the quick revenues generated from diagnostics.
“We wanted to focus on bringing the diagnostics to market next year, and the therapeutics part of the company was making it challenging to raise money,” Bronsther said. That’s because, of course, developing a therapeutic tends to be a longer-term play.
MetaStat’s science comes out of MIT and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; it recently sponsored a study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, on tumor microenvironment of metastasis that backs the idea that its diagnostic holds water.
