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We have a really exciting pipeline at Genomic Health; we started in breast cancer, and we
moved into colon cancer. I'm happy to say that we have helped over 300,000 patients
make really important treatment decisions, but each year over 1.6 million patients are
diagnosed with cancer in the United States alone.
The other big cancer that we haven't tackled yet is prostate cancer. We have a validation
study under way. We expect to be able to launch that test in 2013, should we be successful
in this study, the results of which we hope to be able to announce toward the end of this
year or early next year. The need in prostate cancer is very similar
to the need in breast cancer and colon cancer. Well over 200,000 men are diagnosed each year.
Most are faced with a very important decision around how to handle their disease. Many opt
for aggressive surgery, and that surgery has very significant lifelong side effects that
include incontinence and impotence, which will dramatically impact their life.
We know prostate cancer is unlikely to present future problems for most men. Ninety percent
of men should do fine with no treatment at all, yet we're in a situation today where
90% of men are actually getting fairly aggressive treatment.
What we're really hoping to answer in prostate cancer is whether we can tell men that they
can be comfortable that they have a very low-risk disease, and that they should be able to monitor
that disease according to how they and their physician decide to monitor it, but there's
no need for them to go and get aggressive surgery or treatment at this point.