CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Endomag, the market leader for seed localisation in Europe, has received an extended indication for the long-term use of the Magseed® magnetic marker in any soft tissue. The Magseed® marker has already helped tens of thousands of women to benefit from more accurate marking and removal of breast tumours. This new indication makes the Magseed® marker the first and only localisation seed in Europe that physicians can place days, weeks or even months ahead of surgery to mark any cancer site for accurate removal.
The Magseed® marker is a tiny seed made from surgical grade steel. It is placed in tissue to mark tumours before surgery to help the surgeon accurately locate the cancer in the operating room and remove it in one piece. Once placed, it cannot be dislodged or damaged1 and is detected by the Sentimag® probe with millimetre precision.
“When it comes to marking lymph nodes in patients receiving neo-adjuvant chemotherapy there are very few options – wires are notoriously difficult to place and can easily migrate, often resulting in multiple lymph nodes being removed but not the one you necessarily wanted to take. It’s a huge step forward that we can now use the Magseed marker to mark lymph nodes across Europe, which will allow us to offer our patients more targeted surgery and accurate staging,” said James Harvey, Consultant Oncoplastic Breast Surgeon, Wythenshawe Hospital, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.
“Ever since we launched the Magseed marker we have been asked by European physicians if they can use it to mark a variety of different cancer sites in the body, which also require a longer implantation than the 30 days we had in Europe. We received this expanded indication from the FDA last year and I’m delighted that Endomag is the first to offer this same level of targeted treatment to European cancer patients,” said Eric Mayes, CEO at Endomag
Thanks to the rapid progression in breast cancer treatment, more women are receiving chemotherapy before surgery to help shrink their tumour. However, treating the tumour so early makes it difficult to determine if the cancer has spread beyond the breast when the patient comes to surgery.
With this new indication, the Magseed® marker can now be used to mark suspicious lymph nodes before chemotherapy, and in conjunction with Endomag’s lymphatic mapping agent, Magtrace®, will allow the surgeon to perform a more targeted dissection and determine if the cancer has spread.
Results from two independent studies conducted by Dr Abigail Caudle from MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston and Dr Heather Greenwood, University of California, San Francisco, demonstrated the ease and accuracy of marking positive lymph nodes with the Magseed® marker with 100% retrieval success.3,4
“We have been using Magseed for two years and have performed over a thousand surgeries with the technology. The ability to mark lymph nodes and ensure we remove the cancerous node to examine them closely is a huge advantage for patients, because we spare them extensive and unnecessary axillary surgery,” said Dr Abigail Caudle, Associate Professor, Department of Breast Surgical Oncology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston.
In the United States the Magseed® marker received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the same indication in 2018.
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About Endomag
Endomag is the global technology company that believes everyone deserves a better standard of cancer care. Many of the world’s leading physicians and hospitals use the company’s technologies to help women with breast cancer avoid surgery when it isn’t needed, and experience better outcomes when it is.
The company was founded in 2007 when two professors based at University College London (UCL) and the University of Houston realised that magnetics might be able to improve the existing standard of cancer care. Years of painstaking research led them to successfully develop a magnetic sensor capable of detecting one millionth of the Earth’s magnetic field, the Sentimag® probe.
The Sentimag® probe works like a metal detector, which when placed near the skin’s surface can detect Endomag’s magnetic seed (Magseed®) or liquid tracer (Magtrace®), used in tissue localisation and sentinel node biopsy procedures, respectively. To this day the Sentimag® system has been used in over 75,000 breast cancer procedures at over 500 hospitals in more than 35 countries.
Endomag is a global company headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with an office in Austin, Texas. To date, the company has helped tens of thousands of women around the world access more precise and less invasive breast cancer care. To learn more visit: https://www.endomag.com/
References
1 Harvey, JR, et al (2018). Safety and Feasibility of Breast Lesion Localization Using Magnetic Seeds (Magseed): a Multi-Centre, open-label cohort study. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 169(3):531-536.
2 Jeevan, R. et al (2012). Reoperation Rates After Breast Conserving Surgery for Breast Cancer Among Women in England: Retrospective Study of Hospital Episode Statistics. BMJ. [online] 345(Jul12 2),pp.e4505-e4505.
3 Greenwood 2019 - Feasibility of Magnetic Seeds for Preoperative Localization of Axillary Lymph Nodes in Breast Cancer Treatment. doi.org/10.2214/AJR.19.21378.
4 Simons 2019 – Prospective Trial of Magnetic Seed Localization of Clipped Nodes after Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Node Positive Breast Cancer. MD Anderson Cancer Center. ASBrS 2019, Dallas.
