User:Greekgeekygirl/Abcodia

Abcodia is a specialist company that focuses on biomarkers for cancer screening. Its aim is to discover and validate biomarkers that can be used for the early detection of cancer. Early detection provides more treatment options and has been shown to improve survival rates. Working in collaboration with academics, technology partners and commercial diagnostic partners, Abcodia aims to dramatically improve the way cancer is detected and managed.

History
Abcodia is a spin-out from University College London(UCL) and was founded in 2010. UCL granted Abcodia the exclusive commercialisation rights to a serum collection created by clinical scientists at the Institute for Women's Health at UCL. The serum biobank was formed as part of the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS)which was led by Professor Ian Jacobs and Professor Usha Menon. From 2001 to 2005, more than 202,000 women were randomly recruited onto the trial, all of whom provided a sample of blood on entry. Around 50,000 of these volunteers continued to provide samples annually until the end of 2011. All samples are stored in liquid nitrogen.

The biobank now contains more than 500,000 samples, 350,000 of which are longitudinal, i.e. they were taken from the same person over several years. The UCL team also created a valuable database of phenotypic, demographic and disease incidence for each volunteer. It shows that many volunteers who were originally healthy when they entered the trial have gone on to develop cancer or other debilitating disease.

Disease focus
Abcodia’s primary focus is the discovery and validation of biomarkers that will lead to the development of new biomarkers which will be clinically available for the early detection and screening of cancer around the world. In 2011 it made available serum from the biobank for pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer for collaborative research, closely followed in 2012 by breast cancer and lung cancer.

Early detection and screening of cancer
Without better biomarkers that can accurately detect cancer at an early stage and can be used in national cancer screening programmes, cancer mortality will continue to rise. As the age of the population increases, incidence will also increase and early detection will become ever more important. world cancer factsheet show that by 2030 there will be 22 million people around the world diagnosed every year with cancer, an increase of 73% compared with 2008.

For some types of cancers, screening programmes are already in place (e.g. for cervical, colorectal and breast cancer). However, in some cases, current tests fall short of what is considered ideal by clinicians and in many other cancers, screening cannot be reliably performed.