Questions7 Jun 2015 14:32
I have recently put a toe in the water here, and am tempted to put more in.
the Parsortix product is clearly one tat could be in great demand as currently emerging therapies based on detailed and individual analyses of patient cancers are rolled out.
There are, however, a couple of doubts in my mind, which may or may not be well founded, ass I have no experience in medical diagnostics or in patent law.
Firstly, looking at the pricing of the product, and in particular thye individual test cassettes, there is a huge markup. great for AGL, but with all the other expensive therapies, together with rising demand, how will healthcare systems afford it all/ My suspicion is that product prices will be severely reduced if a widespread rollout is to be achieved - tho maybe only after a honeymoon period, which would afford an exit strategy.
secondly, and more importantly, patent protection. Leaving aside for now the almost inevitable copying that will occur in certain jurisdictions, I wonder how strong the patent protection will be in , say, USa/Europe.
As I understand it Pasortix is essentially a filter at micron level, which screens out normal blood cells to leave trapped cancer cells for analysis. now I am probably being naïve here - after all it has taken much research to get here- but what is there to stop some other researchers coming up with a mesh, say, of similar calibration to do the job of our cassettes?
As said, they may be daft questions, but as the old saying goes, the only daft Q is the one you don't ask.