PARIS (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mauna Kea Technologies, the global leader in endomicroscopy, and EndoControl, a developer of robotics to assist medical and surgical procedures, has announced a partnership with three leading medical and research institutes to develop a tiny, robotic-assisted, flexible endomicroscope that will allow physicians to explore the abdominal cavity in a minimally-invasive manner to determine if cancer patients are appropriate candidates for surgery or would be better suited to chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

Named the PERSEE project, the collaboration aims to help physicians make more informed choices about how to treat cancer patients to ultimately improve their outcomes. The project is backed with support from the Industrial Strategic Innovation program (ISI) of OSEO.

"Surgery is often the first line of offense when treating cancer patients because it offers the potential to cure more than 50% of solid tumors by itself," said Prof. Brice Gayet, head of the Digestive Diseases Department at Institut Mutualiste Montsouris in Paris. "However, conditions that would normally preclude a patient from undergoing surgery -- including peritoneal carcinomatosis or distal lymph node invasion -- are often only discovered in the midst of the surgery. These already weak patients suffer two-fold because they will need to recover from the highly invasive, ultimately unnecessary procedure or inappropriate timing, while other treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation are delayed for weeks. With PERSEE, we hope to develop pre-operative minimally invasive techniques to provide decisive information that will help us plan the best, most efficient strategies, for instance including neoadjuvant therapeutics, to treat cancer patients."
Mauna Kea Technologies and EndoControl will lead the project, with input from teams at Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) of Pierre et Marie Curie University, and the department of digestive pathologies of Institut Mutualiste Montsouris (IMM), both in Paris; and the cancer center Institut Gustave Roussy (IGR), in Villejuif (Cell Imaging, Gastroenterology and Biopathology departments).

Mauna Kea Technologies' Cellvizio(R) probe-based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (pCLE) system, the world's smallest and most flexible microscope, is currently used by leading gastroenterologists and pulmonologists during endoscopy or bronchoscopy procedures to obtain relevant microscopic information in real time in order to help them detect early malignant lesions and decide whether they can be treated on the spot.

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