Vara raises $7 million for AI tool to detect early signs of breast cancer

rose A start-up company (formerly Merantix Healthcare) developing an AI system to screen breast cancer today announced that it has raised $7 million. According to a spokesperson, the revenue will go further to Europe and to develop new uses for its data store.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, with approximately 1.7 million new cases diagnosed in 2012. according to To the World Cancer Research Fund International. Mammography-like screening has proven effective in detecting early signs, but it takes weeks to process. I was afraid The lack of radiologists can affect the ability of health systems to manage illness.

Vara’s solution is an AI-based “second reading service,” which ostensibly reduces turnaround time while increasing patient intake. Using an algorithm trained on a corpus of 2.5 million breast cancer images (and added annotations from more than 15 board-certified experts), Vara detects regular mammograms, flags worklists, Create report for expert to double check and approve Click. Within the viewer tool, Screener can report suspicious results directly to the image using multiple workstations without installing anything. You can also optionally send the test to Vara’s network of subspecialty breast cancer specialists.

Above: A breast cancer screening tool that uses Vara’s AI.

Image credit: Vara

Vara looks less flashy than the approach adopted by Google Health. Achieve better results From a human expert. (In another Google model maybe Predicts metastatic breast cancer with 99% accuracy. ) MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory And IBM They say their model can accurately predict the onset of rapidly spreading breast cancer. And ChironIs in direct competition with Vara and offers a platform that has already been certified for use as the second leader in Europe, with pre-commercial pilots, clinical trials, and testing this year with the UK. It will be held in the United States.

But Vara claims it will detect breast cancer “much earlier” as long as the platform can help lower the priority of healthy cases and focus on those that are more suspicious. .. The company said that more than 250 million mammograms were carried out last year, but in fact there are suspicious findings, requiring only three out of every 100 screened women to recall.

“During the COVID-19 crisis, people often forget to talk about the suffering that breast cancer has brought to families around the world. But because of the strain on the healthcare system, the mammograms were canceled and, as a result, Breast cancer, which could have been detected at an early treatable stage, was overlooked,” CEO and co-founder Jonas Muff told VentureBeat. “In Germany alone, about 3,500 cancers were not detected early because there were no more than 500,000 screened in the last two months. Similarly, the Dutch Cancer Registry said that due to COVID-19 cancellations. Vara is now on the market in Europe, with screening providers offering timely screening to women whose trials were canceled during lockdown Will help.”

Swiss entrepreneurs Jonas Muff and Stefan Bank co-founded Vara in 2018 and have grown to 25 healthcare professionals, engineers and entrepreneurs over the next two years with the support of venture studio Meranix. .. (Meranix is ​​particularly focused on building “AI companies” that provide companies with insights from code, data, and other Merantix graduates.) The Berlin-based team says the technology. This means that it has the CE mark and meets the standards of the European Union Directive. Medical Equipment — Conducted at 15 European-based screening centers, delivering 25,000 to 50,000 mammograms annually.

Vara plans to introduce this platform to programs in Germany, Spain, Poland, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom in the near future.

Omers Ventures led Vara’s Series A funding round with the participation of Thara.Health, Soleria Capital and Plug and Play, raising the total to €9.5 million ($10.57 million). As part of this, Bryony Marshall, Associate Director of Omers Ventures, will be present. Startup board of directors.