Zydus Lifesciences on Wednesday said it has secured exclusive rights to market CanAssist Breast, an innovative and a highly advanced prognostic test for breast cancer patients in the early stages. This will help clinicians decide whether the patient needs chemotherapy or not.

Bengaluru-based prognostic tests research start-up OncoStem has developed this test after five years of research and secured a patent.

Backed by Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures, OncoStem has generated data on patients suffering from breast cancer in India and across the world. The test shows 95 per cent precision in gauging whether hormone positive breast cancer patients need chemotherapy or not.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer in women in India and its risk increases with age. It is estimated that 1 in 29 women in India has a risk of developing breast cancer in her lifetime.

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Sharvil Patel, Managing Director, Zydus Lifesciences, said, “Zydus has been at the forefront of providing access to innovative and affordable therapies which also helps improve the quality of care for cancer patients in India. With this new offering, we expand our offerings to include prognostic and diagnostic approaches that can greatly benefit cancer patients and clinicians.”

CanAssist Breast is a test to optimise treatment selection in early stage (I & II) hormone receptor positive, HER2 receptor negative type of breast cancer.

It determines the patient’s risk of breast cancer recurrence and classifies patient as ‘low risk’ or ‘high risk’ using proprietary artificial intelligence/machine learning methods.

CanAssist Breast spares patients of physiological toxicity and is also patient-centric in terms of affordability as it is being made available at 80 percent lesser than the cost of global tests.

Notably, out of 2.1 lakh breast cancer cases in India, almost 50 per cent are hormone positive, which means that in the absence of such prognostic tests, many patients would undergo chemotherapy that may not help.

“However, with the aid of CanAssist Breast and its precise findings, clinicians can avoid chemotherapy for their patients based on scientific evidence,” said the company.

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Hormone receptor positive is the most common subtype of breast cancer and there are estimated 65,000 new cases of early stage hormone positive breast cancer that get diagnosed every year.

This test can help them to balance their treatment plan in terms of effect, cost and quality of life. At present, such tests are not available in India. Clinicians send tissue samples to the US to avail similar test resulting in high cost burden and potential delay in treatment plan.