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| Dune Medical Devices is rolling out MarginProbe in the U.S.--Courtesy of Dune Medical Devices |
Dune Medical Devices is still riding high on the FDA's approval of MarginProbe, and now the company is rolling its cancer-detecting tech out to hospitals around the country.
Boston-based Dune has secured its first placement, at California's Irvine Medical Center, and the company is in talks to add more hospitals to the fold in the coming months. If all goes according to plan, MarginProbe will be widely available across the U.S. by midyear, the company said.
The device works to minimize the need for repeat operations after breast-conservation surgeries by detecting the presence of cancer at or near the surface of removed tissue, and studies of MarginProbe found that it cut the rate of re-excision by more than 50%. Those results were enough to sway the FDA, and CEO Dan Levangie said the response from physicians has been just as positive.
"With the continued support of advocacy groups, patients and breast surgeons across the country, we look forward to a future where lumpectomy surgery with the MarginProbe system becomes the new standard of care," Levangie said in a statement.
After the late-December approval, Dune scaled up its sales staff to spread MarginProbe across the country, but that's just one facet of the company's strategy. Last month, Dune won a CE mark for version 1.2 of the device, a smaller, more portable rendition Dune says can be manufactured more efficiently.
Next, Dune has its eye on new applications for MarginProbe's core technology, and Levangie told FierceMedicalDevices that the company's real-time tissue-characterization sensor could do for prostate cancer procedures what MarginProbe does for breast surgery.
- read Dune's statement
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