NZX ANNOUNCEMENT: Released 28 November 2013

Pacific Edge has signed an agreement with Stratose, a large national provider network in the USA, to enable the provision of Cxbladder to patients through its large network of payers and providers. Stratose, one of the largest directly managed participating provider networks in the United States contracts with more than 850,000 direct and affiliate healthcare providers and offers a medical network solution for more than 8.6 million Americans through its client base consisting of insurance carriers, third party administrators, health and welfare funds, employer groups and self-insured health plans.

The agreement is the third signed by Pacific Edge with national provider network organisations who contract with medical doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers who have covenanted with an insurer or a third-party administrator to provide health care to insured patients. The agreement with Stratose follows Pacific Edge’s recent announcements of agreements with FedMed and ACPN providing 40 million and 14 million Americans respectively with access to Cxbladder.

Pacific Edge Chief Executive Officer David Darling says agreements with national provider network organisations are a significant component in Pacific Edge’s commercial roll-out of Cxbladder in the United States, the world’s largest single healthcare market.

“The endorsement of these agencies provides a clear commercial process linking providers and payers and signals to clinicians across the United States the availability of Cxbladder.  The addition of Stratose along with FedMed and ACPN now provides network coverage to a significant pool of American people giving commercial access to Cxbladder and its positive benefits as a quick, cost effective, non-invasive and highly accurate cancer detection test, all of which are particularly appealing to US healthcare professionals, patients, and insurers alike.”

Pacific Edge, through its wholly owned subsidiary Pacific Edge Diagnostics USA (PED_USA) has already achieved the first commercial sales of Cxbladder in the US and is processing commercial samples, collected using its proprietary Urine Sampling System, at its custom built laboratory in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

“Our sales and marketing teams are now focussed on the clinicians who are treating the largest number of bladder cancer patients to ensure they fully understand the benefits of Cxbladder,” says Jackie Walker, Chief Executive Officer PEDUSA.

“In addition, we are working with large commercial payers and the Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which provides healthcare insurance to approximately 150 million people. Other large urology customers being targeted include the large Integrated Healthcare Systems, the Veterans Administration (VA), and Large Urology Group Practices (LUGS), who are the point of contact for many patients presenting with hematuria (blood in the urine) which is an early indicator of possible bladder cancer.”

More than one million Americans will undergo medical investigation this year for potential bladder cancer at an estimated cost of $US1 billion. Bladder cancer is one of the most expensive cancers to treat. The very high recurrence of this disease, requiring some patients to receive expensive monitoring for the rest of their lives, causes bladder cancer to have the highest total medical costs of any cancer from detection to death. In the US, the total medical cost approaches $US220,000 per patient.