Tiresias - Witout heath there is no wealth

“…our thirst for life (is) insatiable.”

Lucretius

My good friends,

There is but one serious issue for all of us, and that is our health. There is but one cloud hanging over our health, our lives, and our peace of mind, and that is cancer. Everything else pales into insignificance. Whether you have been diagnosed or waiting to be diagnosed, all aspirations and other endeavours are nothing compared to cancer. It is in us all. It is in our biology. As we age dividing cells accumulate errors which ultimately and inevitably lead to cancer. If all other diseases are cured, we will all get cancer. It is about the cancer!

Truth is, there have been some advances in early diagnosis and treatment in the last 50 years’ war on cancer. Macro-managing; MRI, PET scanning and ultrasound have been a considerable advance. But all these require a macroscopic cancer of somewhere in order I cubic centimetre, before it can be detected, and often much bigger. One cubic centimetre represents 1 billion cancer cells. Even the most effective combined therapies; surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery rarely eliminate more than 99% of the malignant cancer cells. That leaves 1% of cancer cells which are invisible to all forms of imaging that we have at present still in the body. 1% of 1,000,000,000 cells is 10,000,000 cancer cells left behind, invisible to these forms of macro imaging. So unseen ten million malignant cancers remain. No, my friends, they have never got it all.

So, my friends, what's to be done? Optiscan technology offers in-vivo imaging of malignant cells, real time visualization of a single malignant cell at surgery or during screening. This is a revolution. This is new front in the war on cancer. First, it offers the capacity for screening pre-malignant lesions. Many cancers have a long premalignant which are missed or is difficult and expensive with the current technology of biopsy and ex-vivo histopathology. Suspicious lesions can be biopsied, but random biopsies are subject to sampling errors and biopsy is often not feasible, is complicated, expensive, and not feasible to do repeatedly especially in many tissues. Confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) allows continuous monitoring of these lesions as often as the clinician wants and needs. This is a new paradigm. It can be easily applied to oral cancer, ENT cancer, oesophageal cancer gastric cancer, bowel cancer, rectal cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer and skin cancer, and the “low hanging fruit”. But then there is the actual treatment of cancer. As Tiresias has spoken before and as is already in progress, malignant brain tumour, glioblastoma multiforme, the most feared of all brain tumours, with a survival rate which has not changed and iota in the last 60 years, and with a survival of 3 to 12 months, in most patients, despite the most “sophisticated” neurosurgery, taking 6 to 10 hours, followed with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Of course, if you look at the numbers of malignant cells left behind, and in the brain, it is a lot more than 1%, which given the biology, is no surprise. But now it will be different. For the first time the neurosurgeon can now visualise at and beneath and at the surface of the operation operative field and see malignant cells, one single cell, one single malignant cell, live, in real time without a biopsy and without the danger and the reluctance of the surgeon to take pieces of potentially eloquent brain tissue to send off and wait for inaccurate and fraught frozen section. And this is just the beginning.

So, my friends, in these strange times, health issues are dominating everything. All media and everywhere, is about but one thing, health. Health is the existential question and issue of our time. Without health all else is nothing. In the stock market, the only future investment that that you need is in medical technology. And then look around you at the listed medical stocks and their capitalisations. Optiscan is a standout on every count.