Precision Health

Nanostics is a private Alberta-based precision health diagnostics company founded in 2017 to translate and commercialize noninvasive diagnostic tests from the laboratory to the clinic. Its mission is to provide clarity to people about their health by enabling better diagnosis and improving health care decisions through proprietary machine learning algorithms and extracellular vesicle detection. Nanostics’ core technology, ClarityDX®, creates a disease risk score and can be applied to many cancers and other diseases.

Nanostics’ lead test, ClarityDX Prostate®, detects clinically significant prostate cancer and is intended as a reflex test for men with elevated PSA levels, helping physicians and patients make a more informed decision to biopsy or not. In partnership with DynaLIFE Medical Labs and the Alberta Prostate Cancer Research Initiative at the University of Alberta, they launched a clinical validation study in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, which made recruiting men to the study very challenging! However, recently, they were excited to announce positive results from this validation study with 1437 men recruited from Alberta and the United States. They estimate that using this test in the clinic could eliminate up to 37% of unnecessary biopsies and significantly reduce the number of unnecessary treatments for prostate cancer.

Nanostics’ pipeline of other much-needed diagnostics tests includes its bladder cancer test, ClarityDX Bladder. Bladder cancer is the fifth leading cancer in North America. While 70% of cases are low-risk tumors, 30% are aggressive, fatal tumors requiring rapid and intensive treatment. Currently, patients are diagnosed with bladder cancers using a procedure called cystoscopy, an invasive and uncomfortable procedure with limited detection capacity for some bladder cancer types. They designed ClarityDX Bladder to detect aggressive bladder cancer and minimize the number of invasive cystoscopies a patient needs. They recently launched a clinical study to validate this test in Alberta after a 142-patient study showed that ClarityDX Bladder could accurately identify bladder cancer patients from healthy individuals,

Nanostics is also developing a novel immuno-oncology test that monitors disease progression in cancer patients undergoing life-saving CAR-T therapy. Although CAR-T therapy is revolutionizing cancer care, the challenge with this technology is accurately identifying patients responding to treatment from those that are not. They specifically designed their immune-oncology test to address this challenge.

At Nanostics, they aim to adapt their ClarityDX platform to address unmet clinical needs and bring clarity to healthcare decisions to provide substantial savings for healthcare systems and better health outcomes for patients and their families.

To learn more, you can check out their website here.