Evidence only helps a patient if her doctor has it in time to use it

Somewhere today, a surgeon has removed a breast cancer, and a sample of that tumour is waiting to be packed and shipped to a laboratory in another country. The patient will wait several weeks to learn whether chemotherapy should be part of her treatment.

Dr Hemmel Amrania invented the technology behind Digistain during his PhD at Imperial College London. [WHEN AND HOW HE FOUND OUT], he learned that this is how most adjuvant treatment decisions are made around the world. Samples travel to centralised laboratories, and results take weeks to return. For patients paying out of pocket, there is often a harder problem: the test is too expensive, and the decision is made with less to go on.

He believes every patient deserves gold-standard care, whatever her ethnicity or economic circumstances, and that she deserves it as quickly as humanly possible. So Digistain was designed to work where the patient is treated. It measures the tumour’s biochemistry directly from tissue, and hospitals and laboratories can run the test and issue results themselves.

Evidence only helps a patient if her doctor has it in time to use it. Breast cancer is where we began. The same standard will guide every cancer we work on next.