Source: www.rockyradar.com Author: staff "One data point doesn’t tell you very much in most cases,” comments David Brunel, CEO of Biodesix, a medical diagnostics company based in Broomfield, Colorado. This principle guides Biodesix’s approach to developing diagnostics which aim to indentify a patient’s expected response to a particular therapeutic. Biodesix’s technology evaluates multiple biomarkers – identified with a blood sample and analyzed using mass spectrometry – to predict response rather than trying to make a determination based on a single biomarker. VeriStrat® is the company’s first test, categorizing the expected prognosis of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who receive treatment with a class of targeted cancer drugs know as epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors or EGFR-Is. Tarceva (erlotinib) is an EGFR-I commonly used to treat NSCLC patients. VeriStrat classifies patients as either VeriStrat Good or VeriStrat Poor and this information can assist a physician’s decision to pursue treatment with Tarceva or another treatment. To complete a VeriStrat test, a patient’s blood is drawn and sent to the Biodesix lab in Aurora, Colorado. There the sample is run through a mass spectrometer and the data generated from the mass spectrometer is then processed through a proprietary software algorithm to determine a patient’s VeriStrat classification. The algorithm was developed using samples and subsequent disease response data from patients who had received treatment with an EGFR-I. According to Brunel, “several markers were identified in the group of patients whose cancer is prone to respond to EGFR-I treatment versus those whose cancer [...]