At present, the diagnosis and management of EoE requires endoscopies with biopsies that are invasive, resource intensive and often a barrier to diagnosis for a large proportion of patients.  Patients often undergo at least one upper endoscopy per year plus multiple biopsies to assess disease activity and ongoing disease management.  Currently, this is the only available tool to not only diagnose patients but also to evaluate the adequacy of disease control and therapeutic response to treatment.  For children, these procedures are performed under general anesthesia, which carries risks. For adults, conscious sedation is typically used. Additionally, there is a risk of esophageal perforation for patients with longstanding inflammation who may have esophageal narrowing.  These meaningful risks associated with these procedures could be eliminated with NexEos’s novel, non-invasive diagnostic test, NDX-3324.

An additional shortcoming of the current diagnostic standard of care of EGD and biopsy relates to the patchy nature of the disease itself.  The patchy inflammatory involvement of EoE combined with a highly point specific measure such as a biopsy, means that the biopsies may or may not be taken in areas that have active inflammation, thus missing the diagnosis entirely or possibly under-estimating the level of disease severity.  NDX-3324 addresses this issue as well by assessing the entirety of the esophagus.