The New Mexico State
Legislature's Interim Tobacco Settlement Committee has recommended
$730,000 in funding to continue a pilot program to screen veterans
for early-stage lung cancer. The request in favor of the clinical
study administered by the New Mexico Department of Veterans Services
(NMDVS) came from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
(NM Tech) and Biomoda, Inc. (OTCBB: BMOD), a medical diagnostics
company based in Albuquerque and focused on early detection of
cancer.
Biomoda President John Cousins joined NMDVS Secretary John Garcia and
Dr. Daniel H. Lopez, President of NM Tech, to address the Committee in
support of the NMDVS study based on Biomoda's proprietary assay for
early detection of lung cancer. The Committee's vote is the first
step toward an appropriation in the state's 2009 budget. Since 2006,
the Legislature has appropriated a total of $1.65 million for the
study.
"Data from the New Mexico veterans study is an important step forward
in the development of a broad-scale screening protocol that will
ultimately save millions of lives," Cousins said. "Lung cancer is the
leading cause of cancer death and a huge drain on available dollars
for health care. Members of the Tobacco Settlement Committee
understand how important it is to have a commercially viable,
inexpensive, accurate diagnostic for early detection."
Biomoda's preliminary internal testing data has been reviewed by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in support of the NMDVS
clinical study, and the clinical trial has been expanded to include
up to 2,000 patients. The patient population for the study will be
drawn from veterans of the U.S. armed forces who are 25 percent more
likely to develop lung cancer and die from the disease than the
general population.
Biomoda and NM Tech are collaborating on efforts to bring Biomoda's
diagnostic for early-stage lung cancer screening to market.
Scientists and engineers at NM Tech are developing specialized image
recognition technology that will speed the commercialization of the
technology.
Biomoda's non-invasive diagnostic is based on a patented porphyrin
application that preferentially binds to cancerous or aberrant cells
extracted from lung sputum samples. Cancerous cells glow red under
fluorescent light. The cytology-based assay is designed for cancer
screening of large populations at a reasonable cost with expected
commercial accuracy of at least 90 percent.
Biomoda