Bile duct cancer is an aggressive form of cancer with an extremely poor overall five-year survival rate of just 2-5 %. Classified as an orphan disease, annual incidence in Europe and the United States of 15-22,000 patients, and a significantly higher incidence in Asia, makes it a major player and the deadliest of the gastrointestinal cancers. Only a small number of patients are eligible for a complete surgical resection by local resection or liver transplantation, and more than 50% of these relapse. The vast majority are treated by gemcitabine-based palliative chemotherapy with a life expectancy of 11 months, and five-year survival rate of zero %. Thus, there is an urgent and unmet medical need to develop new and better treatment strategies for these patients.
The innovations developed by Seald are a result of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to the diagnosis and treatment of bile duct cancer, based on extensive drug sensitivity assays on living cancer cells, molecular biomarkers, DNA sequencing, extensive bioinformatics analyses and zebrafish models. Sealds’s holistic approach is unique with possible modes of action that can be used on other solid cancers. Our technology includes drug repurposing and innovation on new medical substances, diagnostics and methodology. The stipulated pharma market globally is USD 2.1-4.2 billion, in addition to the markets for diagnostics and platform technology