Pacific Edge is pleased to announce today that it has reached its first commercial agreement of scale in Australia with Northern Health, a major provider of healthcare and hospital services to Melbourne’s rapidly growing outer northern suburbs.

Northern Health provides healthcare services to the rapidly growing suburbs in Melbourne’s outer north through four campuses across the region, with over 5,700 professional staff. Northern Health’s urology needs make it similar in size to New Zealand public Healthcare provider, Canterbury DHB.

Initially, urologists at Northern Health will use Cxbladder Monitor to help manage patients undergoing surveillance following treatment of their bladder cancer. Cxbladder Monitor will be used to identify those patients who can safely forego or defer a flexible cystoscopy at their next scheduled hospital visit. Once implemented, the service will be extended to use Cxbladder Triage for the evaluation of patients referred to urology for investigation of haematuria (blood in the urine and a key indicator of bladder cancer).

Divisional Director, Surgery and Consultant Urologist at Northern Health, Dr Dennis Gyomber, said: “We have built up our knowledge and experience with Cxbladder over time which, together with the conversations and published evidence from a number of New Zealand hospitals already using the test, provides us with the assurance to use Cxbladder in our setting.

“At Northern Health we are aiming to establish ourselves as a Centre of Excellence in Victoria in the diagnosis, treatment and management of bladder cancer. The ability to manage patients using Cxbladder changes the model of care and means many patients will safely avoid the need for invasive cystoscopy procedures and hospital visits, providing obvious patient and clinical benefits. This is especially so when our patients and hospitals are also periodically challenged by access and capacity issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Brent Pownall, Vice President of Commercial and Franchise at Pacific Edge, said: “We are delighted to have concluded our first institutional customer agreement in Australia. It is fitting that it is with Northern Health as Northern Hospital Epping was one of the early Australian hospital customers to embark on the evaluation of Cxbladder. We look forward to working with Northern Health and bringing other healthcare organisations on board in Australia.”

Northern Health will coordinate patient sample collection, and shipping to Pacific Edge for analysis at its CLIA approved and IANZ-accredited laboratory in Dunedin, New Zealand.

CEO of Pacific Edge, David Darling, said: “This agreement in Australia is another in-market validation of Cxbladder’s clinical utility in a large healthcare network. Northern Health concluded that the strong foundation of clinical evidence in support of Cxbladder’s performance and the strong adoption by New Zealand’s healthcare providers have been important elements in bringing this agreement to fruition. We are working with a number of institutional healthcare organisations in Australia and are focused on transitioning them from User Programmes to commercial agreements.”