Experts present comprehensive solutions for addressing oncological diseases

• State-of-the-art diagnostic tests available in the Dominican Republic ensure timely clinical decision-making, treatment, monitoring and disease management, helping to reduce costs and improve patients’ quality of life.

Santo Domingo, June 2024.- Quality standards are essential for achieving an accurate diagnosis and practising precision medicine, said Dr. Angel Medina, deputy medical director of Molecular Pathology at Referencia Laboratorio Clínico.

Speaking at MediTalk Summit 2024, Health with a Vision for the Future, the pathology specialist said that precision diagnosis does not stop at naming the disease: diagnostic tools are used to give the patient an accurate diagnosis that helps select the most effective treatment and predict how the disease will behave.

Dr. Medina said that doctors, healthcare centres and patients have access at the laboratory to a wide range of anatomical pathology and molecular pathology tests, including histopathology, immunohistochemistry and cytology, as well as the molecular biology and genetics departments, all highly specialised and complementary.

The panel “The importance of comprehensive solutions for the diagnosis and monitoring of oncological diseases” also featured Dr. Wendy Gómez García, a paediatric haemato-oncologist, and Dr. Jorge López, flow cytometry and haematology adviser at Referencia Laboratorio Clínico.

“Over time, diagnostic tests have gone from being routine tests to becoming the cornerstone for choosing timely treatment and a precise protocol for each patient, whether adults, adolescents or children,” said Dr. Gómez.

In her remarks, the paediatrician said that progress on childhood cancer has been remarkable in the Dominican Republic, but that although time is of the essence with cancer, desperate measures should not be taken. “We must have strategies that allow accurate diagnoses for appropriate treatment; we would save a great deal, not to mention the improvement in quality of life,” she explained.

She also noted that the country has paediatric intensive care beds. “We need help with coverage of methods for earlier diagnosis; it has a cost, but it will allow us to save in the future and save lives,” said Gómez during the panel moderated by Amelia Reyes Mora, president of AF Comunicación Estratégica.

On flow cytometry, a state-of-the-art method that distinguishes cancer cells from normal cells, and its contribution to precision medicine, Dr. López said that cytometry brought standardisation and objective criteria for defining which disease the patient really has. “That is key, because millions of cells are analysed at once, looking for patterns to see whether they are tumour cells and which specific disease the patient has.”

Flow cytometry has become the global standard of care for patients with haematological neoplasms and one of the tests required for every new diagnosis.

In the Dominican Republic, Referencia Laboratorio Clínico has made a major financial investment and trained pathologists, certified in the study of the disease, with extensive experience and training in all aspects of tissue diagnosis and analysis.

Referencia Laboratorio Clínico’s immunohistochemistry tests also include KRAS mutation analysis in tissue, BRAF mutation analysis in tissue and EGFR mutation analysis in plasma, as well as EGFR mutation analysis in tissue and ALK mutation analysis for lung carcinoma. There are also molecular panels for lung in tissue, prostate in tissue, and lung in tissue and plasma.

About Referencia Laboratorio Clínico.

It was established in 1983 and has served health ever since, with an unwavering commitment to quality.

It has a strict quality control system in its various technical departments, accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), one of the most demanding international assessment systems in the world, and recognised by the U.S. federal government as the strictest inspection programme for clinical laboratory services, whose standards require validation, quality control and audits to ensure diagnostic certainty.

Referencia also holds ISO 9001 certification and ISO 15189, ISO 17025 and AABB accreditations (according to scope), among others.

It currently has the largest branch network, with more than 60 service centres nationwide and 19 within the Red Punto Médico network.