Siemens Launches Healthcare Initiative In Cologne

Siemens Healthcare, with its worldwide presence in the field of healthcare, has established research laboratories for molecular diagnostics in Cologne, Germany. The laboratories will focus on the different aspects of the treatment of breast cancerdefine.

Breast cancerdefine is one of the leading causes of mortality among younger women in the world today; and this despite the different treatment options available currently. In Germany alone, at least 150,000 women are diagnosed with and receive treatment for breast cancer every year. Upwards of 17,000 women die of the disease every year.

Recovery levels have been alarmingly low till date. Much of this is due to the loopholes in diagnosis and therapy being carried out by physicians. Detection of breast cancer at its incipient stage is not being effected, a step that would considerably lower the chances of mortality.

Even after detection, doctors try out multiple therapies haphazardly on patients. This has a negative effect at two levels: it does nothing to bolster the patient’s confidence and at the same time leads to spiraling costs of treatment. A third concern is the possibility of side effects piling up in this kind of indiscriminate use of therapy.

The need of the hour is to tackle diseases like breast cancer at the molecular level and that is precisely what Siemens Healthcare has set out to do. Molecular diagnostics can, in fact, provide invaluable insights into a disease to aid its early detection and specific treatment procedure.

Molecular medicine helps physicians take a more informed view regarding the causative factors and the inter-relationships of illnesses at the micro level. The results so obtained are integrated into knowledge-based applications. As such, it becomes possible to pin-point impending illnesses at a nascent stage. This is the ideal situation, where diseases can be altogether prevented or treated in a case-specific, orderly manner.

Siemens Healthcare has earlier provided breast cancer patients with the infrastructure for ultrasound, mammography and magnetic resonance under the name "Breast Care Solutions". These are now being supported by brand new laboratory diagnostic tests and DP-based evaluation systems.

Currently, some 40 employees of Siemens at the present facilities in Cologne are, at the moment engaged, in designing new diagnostic tests. These tests would help identify the molecular traits of a patient's tumor cells. Hopefully, the results will help physicians arrive at individualized therapies for breast cancer patients.

Siemens Healthcare has won world-wide acclaim in providing complete solutions, right from diagnosis and therapy to care and consultation in the healthcare domain. Justifying the choice of Cologne as the site for its new molecular diagnostic research, Donal Quinn, CEO of Siemens Healthcare’s Diagnostics Division, said, "Siemens Healthcare chose Cologne as the new site for its molecular diagnostics research in Germany because this city is one of Europe's leading competence centers in the field of biomedicine.”

He went on to add, “Viewed from the perspective of Siemens, a medicine that is more strongly based on molecular medical and knowledge-based techniques will be able to make important long-term contributions toward improving the quality and increasing the efficiency of healthcare.”