SAN DIEGO – A software originally developed by physicians at UC San Diego could help oncologists prescribe the right treatment for cancer patients while also shaving weeks off the wait to begin the treatment.
“The oncologists that I talked to say it’s a painful discussion when you have to tell a patient, ‘I’m sorry, you have triple negative breast cancer,’” said i09 CEO Greg Hamilton.
“And the patient says, ‘OK, that’s horrible,’ and in between tears she says, ‘What do we do?’” he continued. “And the oncologist says, ‘I don’t know, we have to wait another two or three weeks to find out.’ That’s a position no one wants to be in.”
CEO
io9
The AI cloud-based technology being developed by io9 could mean such painful conversations will no longer happen.
Using the company’s OncoGaze platfrom, pathologists can examine a biopsy, determine if a patient has cancer, and also immediately detect the relevant biomarkers that will determine the proper treatment, eliminating the need to send the biopsy to a third party for a sequencing test.
Right Medicine for Right Patient
The company was launched three years ago with a friends-and-family seed fundraiser, and Hamilton was hired as the CEO in August. Hamilton, who had been CEO of multiple muscular diagnostic companies, said his first six months were spent figuring out the service offering, regulated pricing and how to position the product.
The company now has launched a Series A fundraiser with a goal of $8 million by the end of the year, which Hamilton said will allow io9 to hire key people from UC San Diego who worked on the technology.
He sees no other company doing exactly the same thing as io9 and anticipates the product could be on the market in 24 to 36 months if approved.
The process involves detecting biomarkers, sometimes called tumor markers, which can be proteins, hormones, genes, genetic mutations or other molecules that are signs of a process or disease.
Chief Scientific Officer
io9
io9’s founders include Dr. Scott Lippman, former director of Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego, and UC San Diego professor Dr. Ludmil Alexandrov.
Hamilton said the two discovered a biomarker for head and neck cancer called 9p loss. The company originally was going to be founded around that discovery, thus the name io9, short for Immuno oncology 9.
Hamilton said io9’s breakthrough came in using artificial intelligence technology to identify biomarkers such as homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) with digital imagery of a pathology slide that contains a thin slice of disease tissue that is examined by a pathologist.
“Biomarkers have become very important in today’s oncology world,” Hamilton said. “We call this precision medicine, or basically the right medicine for the right patient. The challenge today is that these tests are available to identify these biomarkers to get the patient the right medicine, but they’re not being utilized.
“Basically, one out of 30 patients are getting it,” he said. “So while we’re making great progress, the reality is that it’s not widely adopted.”
Positive Study Results
Future adoption of io9’s OncoGaze platform got a boost last week when the company released results of a study showing that DeepHRD, the first biomarker test in the OncoGazeTM AI platform, outperformed FDA-approved HRD companion diagnostics in identifying patients with high-grade serous-ovarian cancer (HGSOC) and metastatic breast cancer who would likely respond to the two current drug classes proven to target HRD.
“This study illustrates how DeepHRD can predict HRD in breast and ovarian cancer from routine pathology slides at the time of initial diagnosis,” said said Alexandrov, who is io9’s chief scientific officer. “Our goal is to move this deep-learning AI platform into the clinical arena as quickly as possible, and we look forward to continuing our work to make a real, immediate and immense difference in the lives of cancer patients and their families by getting them onto the treatments they need faster.”
Race Against Time
Describing the typical current method, Hamilton said an oncologist will take a biopsy, send a slide to a pathologist and read it under a microscope to detect cancer.
The pathologist then sends a report back to the oncologist to determine a treatment for the patient. Many treatments require a sequencing test to identify if the biopsy has certain biomarkers, which is done by sending a slice of the original biopsy to a third-party lab.
“Number one, this process on average takes three to six weeks to get these test results,” Hamilton said. “Number two, when these samples go to the lab, 15 to 25 percent of them come back with no results. The lab can’t get enough DNA to get a result.”
Using io9 software, the pathologist can detect the biomarker immediately, leading the oncologist to the correct treatment.
“The treatment for cancer is a race against time,” he added.
The right treatment started early has a proven success rate for saving lives, while treating cancer with the wrong drug can be ineffective or detrimental to the patient, he said.
Other companies are using digital pathology for other applications, but not for biomarker detection. Based on what Medicare has priced for the other treatments, Hamilton anticipates the cost for the io9 method will be about $700, significantly less than what is charged by labs for sequencing tests, where the cheapest for HRD is $3,000.
io9
FOUNDED: 2021
CEO: Greg Hamilton
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Molecular profiling
WEBSITE: https://io9.ai/
CONTACT: https://io9.ai/contact/
SOCIAL IMPACT: The company’s technology could lead to earlier, correct treatment for cancer.
NOTABLE: The AI software was developed at the Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego.
