We can go right to the primary cancer marketplace and offer these mutation testing services and we will put sales on these testing services. So we are excited to get this going and excited to see our revenues grow from this collaboration. So moving the on oncology Micro RNAs play essential role in almost every major disease area. We cannot play in every major disease area we aren’t big enough nor do we want to do that because we need to focus on certain things but we picked of a few areas where we think we might be able to make some progress. So cardiovascular disease we’ve got two publications in heart failure and the role of Micro RNAs in heart failure genomic disease I will talk a little bit about our work in all timers transplantation. We have a small project in this area around predicting or diagnosing transplant projection and CMV, diabetes and Obesity. So we’ve got this platform and now we are trying to turn on the new indications and we have been able to build a pretty nice pipeline. So we’ve got a thyroid product which I will spend most of our time on because the primary focus the R&D group is on this thyroid product. The next product that we selected to move into oncology is “Bladder Cancer” which I will talk about. We’ve done some work in the past on Bladder Cancer actually have a couple of publications around Micro RNAs and Bladder Cancer so I will tell you a little bit about that opportunity.
All Timers as I mentioned heart failure and kidney rejection. So the thyroid marketplace is a very interesting one, it is a very simple question you are trying to answer here you are trying to answer whether this lump on somebody’s thyroid is Benign or Malignant and it is not so easy to do in upwards of 150, 000 cases a year in the US and historically what’s been the case is that if you are not sure if its Benign or Malignant, the reflex was just take it out if in doubt take it out so take either hard all thyroid with all the associated comorbidities that go along with that and the expense. Well it turns out in a large number of these cases these Nodules are Benign. So we are doing a lot of unnecessary surgeries in this space. So we have been able to demonstrate that Micro RNAs can do this very well discriminate Benign from Malignant and we are working on moving our test into the marketplace in the middle of next year.
We have several competitive advantages vs what’s currently in the marketplace one of which is we can work right off of this mirror. Basically, what happens when a patient presents with a nodule is they stick a fine needle into the nodule and the thyroid. They smear that on a slide and then they look under a microscope this is 19th century technology I am telling you about to see whether or not it looks cancers. I’ve looked at a lot of these slides and I don’t know how they make these calls its very difficult and in a lot of cases they can’t make these calls. Well we can take the material right off of that smear and run a Micro RNA based test and give you an answer nobody else can do that. So we are in the process of commencing larger studies and we are looking to launch this product in the first half of next year.
