Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you describe NeoGenomics and the industry in which it operates?Mr. Gasparini: NeoGenomics is a high-complexity medical testing laboratory that is 100% focused on cancer genetics testing. We are certified by federal and state regulatory authorities as well as other industry accrediting bodies. Our customers are oncologists, pathologists, urologists, hospitals, and other labs throughout the United States. About five years ago, the World Health Organization reclassified all cancers as being genetic in origin, primarily caused by a breakdown or mutation in a person's DNA. By their very nature, genetic tests are approximately 99% accurate and have become extremely important diagnostic tools for doctors and hospitals. This accuracy combined with technological advances in testing methodologies has resulted in an explosion in the use of these types of tests to diagnose cancer. Genetic testing in the cancer genetics segment comprises tests that are focused on cell surface markers, the 46 chromosomes in the nucleus of every human cell, the approximately 25,000 genes located on those chromosomes, or the specific sequences of base pairs of DNA that make up each gene. Although genetic testing has been around for a while, it has really begun to scale and become commercialized in cancer genetics applications over the last five to 10 years. Thus cancer genetics is a relatively new industry. I like to tell people that we are probably somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s in terms of the personal computer analogy in the development of this industry. We believe the overall industry for cancer genetics testing is growing at approximately 25% per year. Currently, NeoGenomics Laboratories is growing revenues 400%-500% per year on a quarter over quarter basis. We currently perform four types of cancer testing in-house: flow cytometry, cancer cytogenetics, fluorescence in-situ hybridization (or FISH) testing, and morphology or morphologic evaluation. All four of these testing platforms are aimed at answering questions about whether or not a patient has a particular type of cancer and the degree of severity of such cancer, if present. There are some complex cancer cases that require us to perform tests from all four platforms to answer the cancer questions posed to us by the requesting physician or hospital. This typically depends on the complexity of the case and the clinical presentation of the specimen we receive. For the most part, flow cytometry, cytogenetics, and FISH testing are what we do and what most clinicians use to answer questions about cancer.
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