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Tessera Diagnostics Inc.'s Robert Masterson bets something as simple as a home pregnancy test can help men catch a killer.
The biotech company's founder said the simple urine test his Seattle startup is developing will provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable way to detect prostate cancer than traditional tests. He's found early investors willing to back him as he helps doctors diagnose one of the leading cancers in men.
The National Cancer Institute estimates that nine million men currently have prostate cancer without knowing it and, according to the American Cancer Society, virtually every man alive will eventually die of it if they don't succumb to something else first. In 2000 alone an estimated 180,000 new cases of "clinially significant" prostate cancers were found and almost 32,000 men died of the disease or related causes. The incidents are expected to climb by 35 percent as the population ages in the next 15 years.
The current means for diagnosing the disease miss the majority of the fastgrowing malignancies that do most of the killing. The traditional PSA test hasn't produced as reliable a solution that the medical community had hoped for.
Masterson said his company is developing the Xanthus Prostate Cancer Diagnostic Kit, which he expects to have available to medical labs on a research basis a year from now. He foresees FDA approval as early as 2003.
Masterson, who holds a Ph.D. in molecular cellular and developmental biology, saw the potential to use a class of...