Image: Solar Egg, Bigert & Bergström. Photo – Johan Strindberg
Ahead of Momentum in Stockholm this October, a note on one lever for faster uptake that gets less attention than funding and regulation: where a test physically runs.
In October, Simsen will be at Momentum at Artipelag outside Stockholm, a meeting convened around The Swedish Cancer Society to ask why world-class European cancer research still takes so long to reach patients. The programme is built around funding, regulation, data, clinical trials and the uptake of innovation, with speakers from the European Commission, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the German Cancer Research Center and others.
Most of that conversation will, rightly, be about money and rules. I want to add one point from where we sit: a good deal of the delay is about where a test physically runs.
Tumour-informed ctDNA is a useful example. It measures circulating tumour DNA against a patient's own tumour profile, which lets you detect molecular residual disease and follow how a cancer responds to treatment. The science is maturing quickly. But for it to change how a patient is managed, the result has to reach the treating clinician inside a timeframe and a system the clinic actually uses.
Much of this testing today is centralised. A sample is shipped, often across borders, to a single reference laboratory, and the result comes back some time later. That model has real advantages in standardisation. It also adds shipping time, cost, and a dependency on one provider, and it can move European patient samples and data outside the health system that is treating the patient.
We think a second route matters: running tumour-informed ctDNA inside the European laboratories that already serve these patients. That is what "your lab, or ours" means for us. Either we run the analysis, or we give a hospital or regional laboratory a validated way to run it themselves, close to the patient. The aim is shorter turnaround inside existing care pathways, samples and data that stay within the European system, and capacity that grows as more laboratories come online rather than sitting behind a single bottleneck.
I am not claiming this is the whole answer. Funding, reimbursement and regulation, the core of the Momentum agenda, decide whether any of this reaches patients at scale, and none of it is in one company's gift. But laboratory infrastructure is a part that a company can build now, and it is where we are putting our effort.
If you are at Momentum and working on cancer diagnostics, clinical trials, or the uptake question, I would be glad to talk while we are both there. You can reach me beforehand at pontus.rehn@simsendiagnostics.com.