Detecting Cancer Early. In the Comfort of Your Own Home.
Battles with cancer are often lost because of our healthcare system’s failure to catch the enemy before it’s too late. Many people want to get tested for cancer, but many of them aren’t comfortable going to the doctor to talk about their health until symptoms present. And, by the time they do, it’s often too late. One in five people die from cancer. And 70% of these deaths are from types of cancers that are not included in routine screens available to patients through the healthcare system.
It is with this grave burden in mind that my business partner and I have come together to found OncoSure.
Our system is simple. The customer subscribes to our service and receives a package every 3-6 months that allows them to effortlessly take a blood sample using a proprietary, non-invasive collection technology and ship it back to us. Then, we screen the sample for over 50 cancer types by [redacted]. Machine learning is then used to determine the customer’s risks and also where the cancer might be present. This information is then relayed back to the customer through our mobile application.
Our target user group is anyone who thinks they may be at risk for cancer, or wants to get proactively tested for cancer. Initially, the customer will pay through a subscription service. Eventually, there may be government adoption of the technology for at-risk patients (similar to the bowel cancer PCA tests sent out to everyone over 55 in Australia). By detecting cancer early, we can reduce disease burden on individuals, families and our healthcare system.
At the moment, our venture is still in its earliest stages. Last week, we were officially selected for entry into the MedTech Actuator Origin for 2022, an early-stage innovation program that turbocharges the development of emerging human health technologies and solutions across Australia and Asia-Pacific.
My co-founder is Oliver Cucanic, a cancer biologist and current PhD student at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre as well as founder of software development company, Rofi Labs.
If you want a picture of our enterprise, it would be best described as a collaboration between Dr Strange and Tony Stark. Oliver and I are both intelligent, assiduous individuals. At first, we were rivals in healthy competition. But we came together when we realised how much more we might be able to achieve by working together.
If you are interested in the future of cancer screening and treatment, I encourage you to watch our elevator pitch below. And as always, I’m open to answering your questions or meeting with you if you believe you might have something to contribute.
Note
The OncoSure project was started in September 2022 with the ambitious goal of providing direct-to-consumer cancer screening through a subscription service for at-home, non-invasive blood sample collection. We aimed to utilise existing FDA-approved non-invasive blood collection technology to enable convenient and regular risk screening for 50 different cancer types in the comfort of a patient's home. These predictions were to be made using high-throughput machine learning-assisted analysis of methylation patterns on DNA fragments shed by tumors into circulation.
In October 2022, our startup progressed through to the Semi-Final round of the MedTech Actuator Origin. This is Asia-Pacific’s MedTech Incubator and afforded us the opportunity to pressure test our business plan, develop our business acumen and liaise with experts in medical technology, artificial intelligence, commercialisation and intellectual property. However, after speaking to various key stakeholders and experts in the field, my co-founder and I decided to pause further work on this project while we focus on completing our research degrees.