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FAQ

Patient support and education is key to what we are trying to do here at Cerca Biotech in our mission to make pioneering change within Oncology (and women’s healthcare in particular). Here are a list of commonly asked Question, feel free to contact us for more information.

Tumour subtyping is a key initial part of the treatment of Breast Cancer. Along with any surgical intervention, subtyping is the start of ridding your body of the cancerous cells that have grown or accumulated. Without the correct subtyping in place, your Oncologist will not know what type of tumour you have, and therefore, won’t have a full picture of the most appropriate course of action to take to most effectively kill it off.

Once your ‘lump’ has been removed, your Oncologist and Pathologist need to decide how to proceed with your treatment. In order to do this, they need to test the lump (a biopsy) to see what receptors are present. By assessing • • How does my specialist currently go about subtyping my tumour? • Currently, once the lump is removed, it’s fixed inside a paraffin block before being sliced very thinly and then specially stained over a two-day period. After this time, your Pathologist looks at the range under a microscope to score it for the various receptor sites on display. This report then goes to your Oncologist. As you will have worked out, there are a lot of human processes, accounts and opinions involved in this way of subtyping, and so you can see why results may be subjective and/or varied depending on the professional.

MammaTyper® simply strips the RNA out of your biopsy sample and looks to identify the four genes responsible for the staging of the cancer, quantifying them individually with great accuracy – and without the need for a subjective view. It’s very much the same as how PCR tests have been able to test us – and give us fast and reliable results for – cases of Coronavirus.

It’s true that depending on your healthcare provider or your location, you may need to pay for your test, but it’s there to serve you as a choice when weighing up your options at a stressful and emotional time should you face a Breast Cancer diagnosis. In simple terms, that choice is easy to make: Stick with the tests defined over 50 years ago which rely on human input and subjectivity and requires 20 manual steps to help decide the best way forward, or use a modern, efficient PCR test to be sure.

Absolutely. Getting the subtyping and staging right is so important in giving yourself the best fighting chance against Breast Cancer. This test has been validated in multiple clinical studies over a period of six years, and with people

MammaTyper® will go a long way to help your Oncologist class your tumour as Luminal A or Luminal B, and once they’ve discussed this with you, everyone will have a much clearer picture about whether chemotherapy is the right course of action for your individual treatment. now seeing for themselves the benefits of PCR testing (thank you, Covid), MammaTyper® proves it is a reliable, accessible and efficient means of playing a key role in the treatment of Breast Cancer.