Start up medical AI company, Lunit, plans to make Artificial Intelligence software the new standard for cancer treatment. The software is called Lunit SCOPE and it analyzes cancer tissue to find more patients eligible for immunotherapy treatment.
According to the American Cancer Society, cancer affects 1 in 3 people in the United States. The National Cancer Institute states that in 2020, an estimated 1,806,590 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States.
New cancer treatments called immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) work by using the patient’s own immune system to fight their cancer. Currently, pathologists use their human eye to review tissue slides. The Lunit SCOPE PD-L1 uses data including PD-L1 expression results of 380,000 cancer cells to find 50% more patients that would benefit from ICI therapy.
One of Lunit SCOPE product offerings is presented as a new biomarker for treatment for multiple types of cancer. It works by using AI software to analyze the patient’s cancer tissue slides and assign a score- the higher the score, the better predicted immunotherapy response.
Lunit has been validating the outcome of Lunit SCOPE IO to predict the ICI treatment outcome in advanced lung cancer patients. Now the study expanded to include multiple cancer types. The study is based on over 1,000 patients across 9 cancer types. The data was collected from Stanford University Medical Center and other major institutions.
The study findings will be presented during the upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual meeting 2021. Lunit is to present four poster presentations, including one of its abstracts about how their AI was validated to access future breast cancer risk among breast cancer patients on more than 4,000 external cases in a “Poster Discussion Session”. This is an incredible achievement for a medical AI startup.
Lunit SCOPE products are to be launched within the second half of 2021. Future plans include going beyond academic research to having their AI softwares used eventually in clinical practice.
