22 Rising Startups Fighting Cancer using Artificial Intelligence

The Omdena “Impact Tech Startups Series” is comprised of game-changing startups, stories, and thought-leadership pieces from leading impact ventures solving real-world problems.

Introduction

Lung cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer – there are hundreds of types of cancer that affect millions of people every year worldwide. Unfortunately, despite medical advancements over the past few decades, the fight against cancer has been largely futile – treatment methods continue to be rudimentary and patients’ outcomes often remain bleak.

However, recent developments in AI in cancer are changing that perception and offering hope for the future of cancer research and treatment by providing researchers with faster and more accurate diagnostic tools than ever before.

Benefits of applying AI in cancer research, diagnosis, and treatment

The use of ai in cancer treatment can ultimately help save lives. Artificial intelligence can help speed up the process of cancer diagnosis by analyzing images and identifying patterns that may indicate the presence of cancer. Also, AI can also be used to develop more personalized treatment plans for cancer patients by taking into account a patient’s individual genetic makeup.

Some AI healthcare startups also use AI to help identify new targets for cancer drugs and to predict how well a patient is likely to respond to a particular treatment. More so, the use of AI in cancer care can also help reduce the cost of treatment, as well as the overall burden on the healthcare system.

Top 22 Rising Startups Applying Artificial Intelligence in Cancer

Cancer is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. But, there is hope. These top 22 startups are applying artificial intelligence in cancer research, diagnosis, and treatment to help save lives. From early detection to more effective treatments, these startups are using AI to make a difference in the fight against cancer.

1. CancerIQ

CancerIQ provides a precision prevention platform that empowers healthcare providers to engage patients, stratify risk and ensure adherence with the latest evidence-based strategies to get ahead of cancer. It offers a robust content library of evidence-based guidelines and risk models to help providers interpret data and navigate patients to the appropriate genetic testing, screening, or treatment interventions.

Country: United States

Founders: Feyi Olopade, Haibo Lu, Moe Alkhafaji, Olufunmilayo Olopade

Founded: 2013

Funding: $20M

Applications or projects:

• CancerIQ’s Screening Toolkit and Navigator:  Stay a Step Ahead of Hereditary Cancer. With CancerIQ’s Screening Toolkit and Navigator platform, one can identify patients with high-risk factors as part of routine care.

• CancerIQ Self-Assessment and Specialist: Get Rid of Admin Days for Good The CancerIQ Self-Assessment and Specialist platforms provide everything we need to offer an enhanced cancer risk assessment experience.

• CancerIQ High-Risk Program and Manager: Manage High-Risk Patients Over Time. With the CancerIQ High-Risk Program and Manager, providers can improve long-term outcomes for high-risk patients.

2. Panakeia

Panakeia makes cancer diagnosis simpler, faster, and cheaper by eliminating the need for multiple tests.

Country: United Kingdom

Founders: Pahini Pandya, Pandu Raharja-Liu

Founded: 2018

Funding: Pre-seed

Applications or projects:

• PANProfiler Breast (ER, PR, HER2)

Breast cancer diagnostic tool that reports tissue ER, PR, HER2 status by analyzing H&E slides. Seamlessly integrates with existing digital workflows and reduces the need for time-consuming lab tests, returning accurate results sooner to patients and multidisciplinary teams.

3. MultiplAI Health

MultiplAI Health is leveraging advances in genomics and artificial intelligence to develop universal remote screening.

Country: United Kingdom

Founders: Charlie Luzzani, Mark Ramondt, Santiago Miriuka

Founded: 2019

Funding: Grant

Applications or projects:

• MultiplAI Superbiomarker

MultipIAI offers a whole blood screening test using RNA Sequencing and Artificial Intelligence to detect virtually any complex diseases, including cardiovascular disorders and cancer. The test identifies molecular variances in the blood that indicate an increased risk of a cardiovascular event.

4. X-Zell

X-ZELL is a fully integrated biotechnology company specializing in early cancer detection.

Country: Singapore

Founders: Sebastian Chakrit Punyaratabandhu Bhakdi

Founded: 2014

Funding: $5.6m 

Applications or projects:

• X-Zell Single-cell Detection Technology

X-ZELL is fusing next-generation single-cell detection technology with artificial intelligence to identify clinically significant cancers at the earliest stages – non-invasively, accurately, and affordably.

5. MNM Bioscience

MNM integrates cutting-edge genomics with the latest breakthroughs in AI to fight cancer. Our goal is to crack the code of tumour biology. 

Country: United States

Founders: Katarzyna Zawadzka, Pawel Zawadzki

Founded: 2018

Funding: $2.6m 

Applications or projects:

• The ARETEAI Platform

ARETEAI platform combines proprietary databases with novel AI algorithms revealing the secrets of tumour biology. Through the use of whole genome sequencing (WGS) and other omics data, the company redefined how to transform data into understanding.

• MNM177

MNM177 is a novel drug target connected to DNA damage response and replication stress pathways. Inhibition of MNM177 in tumours with genomic instability leads to the death of cancer cells via synthetic lethality mechanism. The MNM177 was discovered in thousands of real patients’ data via the ARETEAI platform.

6. Omdena and Mango Sciences

The Omdena team explored various models available in the survival analysis literature and identified the best-performing algorithms. The model predicts the survival probability of a patient and the next treatment period for specific, often less costly, drugs. 

The project partner Mango Sciences is a Boston-based leading emerging market data science company connecting millions of underrepresented patients to precision medicine. The company’s Querent™ platform utilizes industry-leading AI analytics to transform deep clinical data into key insights that drive global health improvements.

The team explored the standard set of models available in the survival analysis literature and identified the best-performing model with the highest concordance index. An example of visualization and prediction in Tableau can be found below. 

7. Savor Health

Savor Health is a B2B digital therapeutic providing personalized nutritional strategies to prevent and manage the symptoms and side effects of cancer.

Country: United States

Founders: Susan Bratton

Founded: 2018

Funding: Seed

Applications or projects:

• Casserole Patrol™

Savor Health’s Ina® empowers cancer patients with personalized nutrition and symptom management interventions and guidance which empower them to remain independent and take back control. This is when the Casserole Patrol™ rallies around the patient to help. Ina® also supports the Casserole Patrol™ with recipes, side effect prevention and management tips, menu plans, and other guidance so that they can bring their loved ones with cancer the most appropriate meals, groceries, and supportive care products.

8. Concr

Concr is an emerging software platform to combat cancer. It combines cutting-edge machine learning techniques with a deep scientific understanding of tumour progression to accurately predict cancer evolution in response to treatment.

Country: United Kingdom

Founders: Matthew Foster, Matthew Griffiths, Uzma Asghar

Founded: 2018

Funding: £499.8K

Applications or projects:

• The Concr Platform

Concr is a platform technology facilitating cross-talk between biopharma, diagnostic companies, and healthcare providers through data. Their unique astrophysics-based methodology allows iterative learning between multiple and disparate data sources throughout all stages of a drug journey into the clinic — from pre-clinical development to post-approval.

9. Biotome 

Biotome developing the world’s first simple blood test for stomach cancer screening.

Country: Australia

Founders: Alma Fulurija, Barry Marshall, Samuel Lundin

Founded: 2017

Funding: Non-Equity Assistance

Applications or projects:

• Epitope Mapping

Biotome offers cutting-edge expertise in epitope mapping, marker identification, and bioinformatics to research companies and organizations.

• IP Protection

Biotome patentable peptide markers are fundamental to commercialization. IP protection carves out space for diagnostics in a market dominated by lower-accuracy, non-proprietary tests. They provide IP services to our collaborators interested in opportunities for shared IP and commercialization rights.

10. Omdena and RadmolAI

The Omdena team developed and deployed two machine learning-enabled applications, one for lung cancer prediction and one for colorectal cancer (CRC) prediction. The user of the apps can enter the input data for a patient and get the likelihood of cancer as an output. The partner for this project, Radmol AI, is a Dublin-based and Microsoft for Startups-supported company on a mission to minimize the risk of delay and errors in medical diagnosis.

Within 10 weeks, the AI engineers covered the following steps:

Collecting datasets for cancer patients with previous symptoms, demographics data, and ailments. Labeling datasets appropriately. Training and testing various machine learning models for lung and colorectal cancer (CRC) prediction. Deploying two applications to visualize the predictions (see the screenshot below) 

11. Quantaras (Quantitative Radiology Solutions)

Quantitative Radiology Solutions offers advanced body-wide quantification of medical images.

Country: United States

Founders: Joe Camaratta

Founded: 2017

Funding: $2.8m

Applications or projects:

• Quantaras Contour Companion

Quantaras Contour Companion is a FDA-cleared cloud-based software-only medical device that performs auto contouring of organs at risk in the Head Neck and Thorax.

12. Vivan Therapeutics

Vivan My Personal Therapeutics (MPT) is a company pioneering personalized cancer therapeutics using a new assay technology.

Country: United Kingdom

Founders: Laura Towart

Founded: 2018

Funding: £700K

Applications or projects:

• Oncology Drug Discovery with Vivo avatars

Vivan avatars will improve your potential to succeed in the clinic by helping the clinic make better decisions every step of the way. They create a biological twin for each patient by replicating polygenic tumour complexity (engineering up to 20 mutations, not just one mutation) into a living, biological system.

13. Omdena and Reboot Rx

Omdena has partnered with Reboot Rx in the project to improve the lives of cancer patients by identifying existing non-cancer generic drugs, the team built an automated data extraction and classification exercise to create a structured database, at scale, of outcome measures contained in text-based clinical study abstracts. Data extraction is limited to text contained in study abstracts (not using the full study text). Reboot Rx provided a list of clinical studies with study ID, title, and abstract. To contain the scope of this exercise, Reboot Rx provided a list of outcome measures, outcome labels, and expected data format (%, months, days) for extraction. The accuracy of extracted data and labels was evaluated using a test dataset curated by the Reboot Rx team. 

Project outcomes included machine learning models to classify defined variables, curated training annotations, and extracted datasets using an NLP pipeline.

14. AliveX Biotech

AliceX Biotech applies AI+Immunology for early cancer screening, precision medicine, and the next era of biomarker research.

Country: China

Founders: Shirley W.

Founded: 2017

Funding: Angel 

Applications or projects:

• AliveX end-to-end, integrated AI immunology platform

We generate & combine multi-omics data with systems biology, computational modeling, and AI to advance human health through the decoding of the immune system and identification of novel biomarkers & therapeutic targets.

15. iLoF – Intelligent Lab on Fiber

iLoF – Intelligent Lab on Fiber is enabling a new era of personalized, precision medicine.

Country: United Kingdom

Founders: Joana Paiva, Luís Valente, Mehak Mumtaz

Founded: 2019

Funding: $3.2M

Applications or projects:

• iLoF Technology

iLof breakthrough technology, based on AI algorithms and a patented low-cost photonics device, identifies biological nanostructures in liquid dispersions (e.g. plasma) facilitating personalized and precision medicine applications.

16. Cure Match 

A leader in precision medicine, the CureMatch Decision Support System helps guide oncologists in the selection of personalized cancer drugs.

Country: United States

Founders: Blaise Barrelet, Igor Tsigelny, Navid Alipour, Razelle Kurzrock

Founded: 2019

Funding: Venture – Series Unknown

Applications or projects:

• Curematch Analysis

CureMatch Analysis is unique in that it looks at all of a patient’s mutations together rather than individually. This enables drug combination recommendations targeting multiple mutations rather than single drug therapies.CureMatch also integrates multiple types of biological results (DNA sequencing, protein expression, etc.) into its comprehensive analysis, and considers commonly-used cancer treatments as well as all of the latest advances in cancer care, including immunotherapy, targeted therapy, hormone therapy, and newly approved cancer drugs.

 17. AEYE Health

AEYE Health is a venture-backed digital health startup that developed AI algorithms that provide immediate, totally autonomous, point-of-care interpretation of fundus images for various conditions.

Country: United States

Founders: Danny Margalit, Zack Dvey-Aharon

Founded: 2018

Funding: $10m

Applications or projects:

• Prospective Clinical Study For The Detection Of More-Than-Mild Diabetic Retinopathy

Images from two fundus cameras were evaluated in a multisite study – a desktop camera (Topcon NW400) and a handheld camera (Optomed Aurora). One image per eye was obtained from each patient. Images were analyzed using AEYE Health’s AI-based system. The results of AEYE’s system were compared to results obtained from a panel of experts.

18. Theator

Theator is a surgical intelligence platform that combines artificial intelligence and computer vision to improve surgeon performance.

Country: United States

Founders: Dotan Asselmann, Tamir Wolf

Founded: 2018

Funding: $42.5M

Applications or projects:

• The Surgical Intelligence Platform

Using AI and computer vision, Theator extracts and annotates every key moment from real-world procedures. Now, surgeons can gain deep scientific insight into their own performances and those of their colleagues worldwide.

19. Medivis

Medivis brings together doctors and engineers of all backgrounds from around the world, to ensure a comprehensive knowledge base backs up all projects we undertake. Just some of our in-house expertise includes neuroanatomy, radiology, mixed-reality technology, graphics engineering, user-experience design, database architecture, web applications development, and 3D modeling.

Country: United States

Founders: Christopher Morley, Osamah Choudhry

Founded: 2018

Funding: $2.5M

Applications or projects:

• SurgicalAR

FDA-cleared SurgicalAR with HoloLens 2. The future of computer-assisted surgery leverages augmented reality and artificial intelligence to improve surgical outcomes for patients and drive cost savings for institutions.

• The Augmented Reality Anatomy Lab and Learning Platform

Medivis is building the future of immersive health education. They’re harnessing the power of augmented reality and spatial computing to build software that improves learning outcomes and student engagement while advancing the core missions of innovative institutions.

20. Nabta Health

Nabta Health discovers new ways for women to prevent, identify and manage Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).

Country: United Arab Emirates

Founders: Mussaad Al-Razouki, Saba Alzabin, Sophie Smith

Founded: 2017

Funding: $1.5M

Applications or projects:

• The Nabta Health App for Women

The platform is designed to give women 24/7 access to holistic healthcare, offering virtual, remote, and in-clinic care options.

21. Tambua Health

Tambua Health uses lung sound analysis to transform the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases.

Country: United States

Founders: Daniel Gathigai, Eric Kirima, Lewis Wanjohi

Founded: 2018

Funding: $250k

Applications or projects:

• T-Scope Scanner

The T-Scope scanners employ the same transducer technology used by all high-end compact and cart-based ultrasound systems but with cutting-edge efficiency.

• T-Scope Cloud

The T-Scope Platform is secure storage with clinical workflows that securely integrate with any EMR, PACS, and VNA systems, for T-Scope ultrasound probes and third-party ultrasound systems and imaging systems.

• T-Scope Live 

The T-Scope telemed platform is a set of features for live video/audio collaboration and consultation between a ‘primary’ T-Scope user (such as an attending physician, nurse, midwife, etc.) and an expert sonographer or specialist, considered as the ‘secondary’ user.

22. C the Signs

C the Signs gives GPs the ability to simultaneously check combinations of signs, symptoms, and risk factors, in an easy-to-use format.

Country: United Kingdom

Founders: Bhavagaya Bakshi, Miles Payling

Founded: 2017

Funding: $6.9M

Applications or projects:

• C the Signs Cancer Dashboard

C the signs use AI technology, data, and the latest research to find cancer at the earliest, most curable stage – helping people live longer, healthier lives. 

Here are the top companies and startups around the world applying AI in cancer research, diagnosis, and treatment to change and impact lives for the better.

Please reach out to us to let us know if we missed any other AI companies in cancer and we will make sure to add them to the list.

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