Breast Cancer affects one in eight women, and in 2017, an estimated 252,710 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S alone.
It often requires procedures that either remove the whole of the breast- a procedure known as mastectomy or another procedure that is called lumpectomy, which only removes the part of the breast containing the tumor.
But lumpectomy, as easy as it sounds is in reality not so; at times during the procedure, cancerous cells can get left behind necessitating a second procedure.
The US-based Dune Medical’s MarginProbe is a technology that exploits the fact that healthy tissue and cancerous tissue have different electrical properties, hence uses radiofrequency spectroscopy to identify cancerous tissue in real time. This RF spectroscopy spots cancerous tissue by measuring the reflection of electromagnetic fields from the patient’s tissue.
Dune Medical which for some time now has been looking to apply its RF spectroscopy platform to other cancer types, including prostate, colon, lung and pancreatic cancers, now announced that it has raised an impressive $12.3 million to do so.
“[The biopsy system] will provide radiologists and surgeons immediate graphic characterizations of tissue abnormalities along the tip of the biopsy needle, just before samples are taken,”
said Dune Medical CEO Dan Hashimshony. “This real-time insight can help reduce the time to a definite diagnosis and repeated biopsies.”
