ROCKVILLE, Md. & SHANGHAI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--20/20 GeneSystems, Inc. (www.2020gene.com) released this week in China what is believed to be the world’s first machine learning algorithm commercialized for use in conjunction with blood tests to aid in the early detection of lung cancer. The cloud accessible software, marketed in China by MyBioMed, Ltd. (www.My-Biomed.com) (“MBM”) is expected to be utilized over the next six months by at least 20 hospitals in five or more cities to help in distinguishing between benign vs. malignant pulmonary nodules following CT imaging.
The algorithm, built and validated with data from over 1,000 patients tested at the Tianjin Cancer Institute combines the values of biomarker—tumor associated proteins in the blood—and individual patient characteristics such as their age, smoking status, and nodule size. It could potentially increase the number of cancers detected by more than 50% over current methods. Artificial neural networks are incorporated to permit continuous improvements as more data is acquired over time.
Lung cancer is a significant burden in China as more than half of adult men in that country are current or former smokers and heavy air pollution further contributes to the disease. "Lung cancer in China has a very high disease incidence and the current solution is to do early screening which often leads to good outcomes at a low cost,” says Yilong Wu, M.D. Chair of the Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology and himself a chest surgeon and lung cancer expert. “Low-Dose CT(LDCT) screening has been recognized worldwide as an approach to reduce lung cancer mortality but these scans uncover many nodules that turn out to be benign, and unneeded biopsies and surgery can be dangerous to many patients.” says Wu. “I am very optimistic about the approach introduced by 20/20 and MBM of adding bioinformatics and artificial intelligence methods to improve the sensitivity and specificity of detection and look forward to seeing continued expansion of their data sets and confirmatory studies."
Jackson Zhu, who practiced as a thoracic surgeon and is now CEO of Shanghai based MBM, commented: “Our partnership with 20/20 heralds a new chapter for both companies today. MBM and 20/20 are working together to drive the commercialization of this lung nodule cancer risk assessment tool in China with the potential of helping tens of thousands of patients every year that present with suspicious lung nodules following a CT scan. The combined expertise with 20/20 and MBM will help to drive a revolution in cancer screening across China enabling the health and wealth of our nation.”
20/20’s cloud based lung nodule assessment software is the company’s first product marketed using a Software-as-a-Service revenue model, according to 20/20 CEO Jonathan Cohen. “It is preceded by the company’s U.S. laboratory based blood test for the early detection of lung cancer (www.BloodTestforLungCancer.com) and will be followed soon by a pan-cancer test and algorithm for the simultaneous screening of multiple cancers from a single blood sample,” said Cohen.
About 20/20 GeneSystems:
20/20 GeneSystems, Inc. is a Rockville, MD based company focused on reducing cancer mortality worldwide through early detection. It has pioneered a novel approach which is calls “20/20 Hindsight” of continuous machine learning using large patient data sets of biomarker values with clinical factors such as age, gender, and smoking history to improve the accuracy of the most widely used cancer biomarkers.
