Endocare Has Deal With 10 Cancer Centers
Irvine-based Endocare Inc. will announce today that 10 of the nation’s leading cancer centers, including two in California, have signed up to offer its groundbreaking treatment for prostate cancer.
The announcement signals growing acceptance and accessibility for cryosurgery--a less invasive process that uses extreme cold to kill cancer cells without removing them from the body--to fight prostate disease, Endocare Chief Executive Paul Mikus said.
“It’s pretty good evidence that the procedure is gaining traction in the marketplace,” he said.
Endocare’s treatment, called targeted cryoablation, gives patients an alternative to traditional surgery and radiation. About 180,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, and 37,000 die of it.
Cryosurgery is virtually painless, and patients recover from it in about a week, compared with six weeks after conventional surgery, said Dr. Stuart Fisher, a Santa Monica urologist with UCLA’s Department of Urology. Fisher said he has used Endocare’s procedure about 30 times in the last three years, achieving results equal to those with other treatment methods.
Cryosurgery has been around since 1990, when a different company introduced technology that produced lackluster results, Fisher said. Endocare brought out a much-improved version in 1996.
“It would be like comparing a computer from 1990 with what you use today,” Fisher said.
Endocare’s procedure cleared a major hurdle in July when it became reimbursable by Medicare.
Endocare said it has installed the $190,000 piece of equipment needed for the procedure at nine well-known cancer treatment facilities: UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center, Stanford University Medical Center, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, the University of Michigan Medical Center, Emory University Hospital, Detroit Medical Center’s Harper Hospital and Tampa’s H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center.
The 10th center will be identified within the week, company executives said.
In most cases, Endocare places the equipment for free, then collects fees of $3,000 to $3,500 per procedure, Mikus said. As doctors in these centers learn to perform cryosurgery, Endocare expects the number of procedures to rise from a few hundred a year to thousands, he said.
Endocare lost $2.5 million in the quarter ending Sept. 30 but reported revenue of $1 million, a 91% increase over the same period in 1998. Its stock price reached a high of $8.25 in early September and closed at $7.75 on Friday.
