- PredicTx Health is a University of Melbourne spin-out that uses AI, body composition analysis and 3D imaging to make chemotherapy more personalised.
- Traditional chemotherapy ignores a lot of important, personal factors, leading to incorrect dosing for over 80% of cancer patients.
- PredicTx Health has created a platform that works out patient-specific doses, improving clinical outcomes.
Website: www.predictx.health
What is PredicTx Health?
PredicTx Health is a ‘precision oncology’ startup spun out from the University of Melbourne and co-founded by surgeon Professor Justin Yeung and digital health innovator Abhijeet Waykar.
Through their research, PredicTx Health has created an AI tool that personalises chemotherapy dosing by using data from CT scans. Currently, oncologists use a ‘one size fits all’ approach based on body surface area, which ignores each patient’s individual physiology.
Instead, PredicTx Health is able to analyse fat, muscle and metabolism to make chemotherapy dosages more accurate.
Backed by 6 years of research at the University of Melbourne, the company has just raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round, which will allow it to be deployed and tested in hospitals across Australia and India before scaling internationally.
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What Makes PredicTx Unique?
What makes PredicTx unique is its new way of using AI and 3D body scans to more accurately personalise chemotherapy dosing. Instead of just taking height and weight into account, their technology analyses muscle, fat, bone and tumour volume to see how a patient might react to the treatment.
This has the ability to reduce the toxicities that many experience from the wrong doses, an issue that currently affects over 60% of colorectal cancer patients.
Not just based on AI and data, PredicTx is backed up by top surgical academics and digital health builders, and it has already seen clinical benefits through tests at Western Health.
Is There A Market For AI-Powered Precision Oncology?
Unfortunately yes, and it’s only growing. Every year, 20 million new cancer cases are diagnosed worldwide, with millions of those needing chemotherapy. (WHO)
But despite a push for medicine to be more personalised, chemotherapy dosing is still calculated by an outdated method taking only height and weight into account. This approach, which is used all over the world, doesn’t actually take into account important elements like muscle, bone and fat, which are all important factors when working out how drugs are metabolised by the body.
For example, someone weighing 80kg might have a very high muscle density and little fat, contributing to the increase in weight. Conversely, another person of the same height and weight may be much more inactive, with the majority of that weight coming from fat. Under the current calculations, these two people would be treated the same.
The result? More than 80% of cancer patients get the wrong chemotherapy dose. This can lead to some nasty side effects like immunosuppression, heart attacks and chest infections, causing 1 in 3 patients to stop treatment prematurely.
PredicTx Health is correcting this through its AI. By using CT scan data, they can more accurately predict the right dosage for each individual person, allowing them to reduce toxicities and improve success rates.
Given the stats that cancer cases are on the rise, the demand for precision oncology is only getting stronger.
Where Can You Find PredicTx?
PredicTx Health is currently partnering with hospitals, cancer centres and research labs in Australia and India, with initial clinical trials now taking place Western Health.
Find out more at PredicTx.com
