Test helps identify type of cancer in tumor sample

The FDA has cleared for marketing a test that can help health care professionals determine the type of cancer cells present in a malignant tumor.

The Pathwork Tissue of Origin test (Pathwork Diagnostics, Sunnyvale, CA) uses microarray technology to compare the genetic material of a patient’s tumor with genetic information on malignant tumor types stored in a database.

Pathwork’s proprietary software converts the scanned image data to gene expression measurements. The gene expression patterns are compared with known gene expression patterns in the database that correspond to different tumor types. The test has been found to provide patterns that confirm existing tissue of origin of the 15 common tumor types, including bladder cancer, using standard clinical and pathological information.