PHC Corporation (headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo, President: Nobuaki Nakamura, hereafter PHC) and NovaScan, Inc. (headquarters: Chicago, Illinois, CEO: Craig Davis, hereafter NovaScan) announce the launch of a collaboration through which they will seek to explore the feasibility of MarginScan™, an investigational “ex vivo” (outside the body) medical device that will seek to support physicians in detecting non-melanoma skin cancer.
PHC is a subsidiary of PHC Group*1, a global healthcare company that develops, manufactures, sells, and services solutions across the business domains of diabetes management, healthcare solutions, and diagnostics & life sciences. PHC’s In Vitro Diagnostics Division has collaborated with partners for more than 30 years to develop and manufacture high-performance medical devices including blood glucose monitoring systems to help support effective medical treatment. NovaScan is a U.S. company engaged in clinical-stage diagnostics and tissue detection in the oncology field. NovaScan has developed proprietary technology for detecting the presence of cancer tissue in real-time, and is expanding its business to commercialize its point-of-care platform to medical institutions in the future.
PHC and NovaScan are collaborating to explore feasibility of a device to help enable comprehensive real-time margin detection for non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSC). Non-melanoma skin cancers are the most common cancers in the world*2. The American Academy of Dermatology estimates that one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime, and the vast majority of these will be NMSC*3. One of the proposed uses of MarginScan™ is to seek to support Mohs surgery procedures for skin cancer treatment. Mohs micrographic surgery is an operative method used to detect the presence or absence of a tumor in the margins of a surgical excision, thus enabling clinicians to minimize the impact on surrounding normal tissue. Currently, Mohs is the only modality for skin cancer treatment that involves comprehensive intraoperative margin assessment. MarginScan™ has the potential to help reduce patient morbidity and improve outcomes for both patients and clinicians. This collaboration will integrate PHC’s manufacturing excellence with NovaScan’s advanced technology for detecting carcinoma tissue. The two companies will also explore other potential strategic collaborations to provide new value to patients and healthcare providers in the oncology field.
Hiroyuki Tokunaga, Member of the Board of PHC Corporation and Director of its In Vitro Diagnostics Division said, “We look forward to collaborating with NovaScan to provide high-value-added solutions in the pathology diagnostics field, leveraging our expertise in highly reliable medical device development. PHC is also committed to accelerating the development of point-of-care technology that enables highly convenient testing, to contribute to our mission of improving the quality of healthcare around the world.”
NovaScan CEO Craig Davis remarked, “We are positively thrilled to be collaborating with PHC Group, a world class provider of oncology diagnostics solutions and medical devices. Our platform technology enables in vivo and ex vivo cancer detection, in real time and without expensive capital equipment or the need for steep clinician learning curves. We believe that MarginScan™ has the potential to be employed in standard of care procedures for the most common cancers in the world. PHC is a collaboration partner that can make this a reality, in skin cancer and beyond.”
* MarginScan is trademark of NovaScan, Inc.
*1 Generic name for PHCHD and its operating subsidiaries
*2 Source: World Health Organization, International Agency for Research on Skin Cancer https://www.iarc.who.int/cancer-type/skin-cancer/
*3 Source: American Academy of Dermatology Association
https://www.aad.org/media/stats-skin-cancer
About PHC Corporation
Established in 1969, PHC Corporation is a Japanese subsidiary of PHC Holdings Corporation (TSE 6523),or PHC Group, a global healthcare company that develops, manufactures, sells and services solutions across diabetes management, healthcare solutions, and diagnostics & life sciences. PHC Corporation provides medical devices, as well as develops research and medical support equipment for new modalities in life sciences. PHC Group subsidiaries also include Ascensia Diabetes Care Holdings AG, Epredia Holdings Ltd., and LSI Medience Corporation. With the mission to contribute to the health of society through healthcare solutions that have a positive impact and improve the lives of people, we are proud to offer our products and services to customers in more than 125 countries around the world.
About NovaScan, Inc.
NovaScan is a venture-backed, clinical stage oncology company that has developed a low cost, point of care platform for real time cancer detection and stratification. NovaScan’s platform is active in lung, breast, skin, and GI.
URL: www.novascaninc.com/