Avelas’ mission is to increase the precision of cancer surgery and improve long-term outcomes for patients by providing real-time cancer detection with pegloprastide.
Surgery is often the first-line treatment for cancer patients. However, despite advances in radiologic and surgical techniques, surgeons continue to rely mainly on eyesight and palpation to determine the extent of cancer. Too frequently, surgeons will not know where the tumor begins and ends while operating. This uncertainty can lead to incomplete detection and removal of cancer, which most often is determined when histopathology reports become available days or weeks after a procedure.
The presence of residual cancer after a surgery is referred to as a positive margin and is increasingly recognized as a significant unmet need across numerous cancer surgeries. In breast cancer, the lead investigational indication for pegloprastide, women with positive margins are more than 2x likely to have cancer recurrence than those with negative margins. Therefore, the presence of positive margins results in a significant number of women each year returning for a repeat (re-excision) surgery with the goal of achieving negative margins. Current re-excision rates for lumpectomies in the US are estimated to be between 20-40%, with more than 50,000 women annually returning to the operating room for a subsequent breast cancer surgery.
Ultimately, Avelas’ goal is to empower surgeons to operate once with pegloprastide, thereby improving outcomes for patients and providing substantial benefit to the entire healthcare system.