1,000 years of tissue removal: Biopsies to Biomarkers

Today, a portion of biopsy-derived material is still lost after most biopsy procedures —discarded as waste despite containing valuable molecular information, at a time when tissue samples are often insufficient. Virchow Medical is the company that has brought hospitals the Crow’s Nest® Biopsy Catchment System, to help protect their bottom line by avoiding un-reimbursed second biopsies, and the margin benefits of having fewer patients in your IV clinic receiving chemotherapy and more receiving targeted immunotherapy. Today’s speaker is Virchow’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. Alexander Arrow.

• Like many fields of medicine, biopsies have a long history but have progressed rapidly over the past half century.
• Today, biopsies are minimally invasive, which yields very small tissue specimens, just at the time in history when molecular testing capabilities, and therefore demand for tissue to test, is skyrocketing. Hence, there is a growing imbalance between tissue supply and demand.
• The availability of targeted immunotherapy drugs to treat some 70% of solid tumors means that every biopsied patient whose specimen is cancer-positive should be sequenced. Unfortunately, the ~half of biopsied patients who don’t receive molecular testing don’t know if they have a druggable mutation, and therefore miss out on targeted immunotherapy.

By recovering and preserving otherwise discarded cellular material, Virchow’s technologies extend the utility of each biopsy—helping more patients access genomic sequencing and the targeted therapies it enables.