Guided Therapeutics, Inc. recently announced it has expanded patient access to its LuViva Advanced Cervical Scan to Costa Rica. This marks the 20th country where Guided Therapeutics has shipped LuViva, a technologically advanced, non-invasive diagnostic device that scans the cervix with light and uses spectroscopy to measure how light interacts with the cervical tissue.
“We are pleased to see our growing traction among doctors, governments and distributors in the developing world as stakeholders increasingly recognize that LuViva can help prevent women’s cervical cancer through earlier detection,” said Gene Cartwright, CEO of Guided Therapeutics. “We will continue to focus on new markets, like Costa Rica and others, where LuViva will be used as a front line screener for cervical cancer.”
Today, the international market for cervical cancer screening and diagnostics, which is currently mostly practiced with cytology (Pap test) for primary screening purposes, is estimated to be worth $6 billion, with a potential growth to nearly $9 billion by year 2020. Currently, there are about 2.6 billion women as young as 15 years of age who are at risk of developing cervical cancer.
A pilot screening program utilizing the LuViva system is planned to launch in Costa Rica in the upcoming weeks. The country has a population of more than 1.8 million women who are at risk of developing cervical cancer. At present, statistics show that about 297 women receive a diagnosis of cervical cancer and approximately 116 die from it, with this malignancy ranked third among the most commonly diagnosed types of cancer among women aged 15 to 44 years old in Costa Rica.
Guided Therapeutics, Inc., maker of a rapid and painless testing platform based on its patented biophotonic technology using light for the early detection of disease at the cellular level, has partnered with its distributor Stem World Enterprises, to conduct a large-scale cervical cancer screening among Kenyan women, in cooperation with the Kenyan National Ministry of Health (MOH). The First Lady Margret Kenyatta’s Beyond Zero program is aiming to screen up to 12,000,000 women for cervical cancer. Each following year, President Uhuru Kenyatta has set a target of screening half the female population of Kenya for the disease.