Oncoustics CEO Beth Rogozinski (Beth Rogozinski).Photo Credit: Acoustics
Approximately 4.5 million adults In the United States, it is estimated that there is liver disease, and with the increase of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, this number is expected to increase.
It is characterized by excessive fat in the liver, which can cause inflammation or scarring over time. Because this condition usually has no symptoms, It is often undiagnosedCurrently, the gold standard for diagnosis is biopsy, but the company is also working on developing non-invasive screening tools to detect diseases as early as possible.
One of these startups is Oncoustics, which applies artificial intelligence to raw radio frequency ultrasound signals to distinguish between healthy liver tissue and diseased tissue by measuring the acoustic properties of tissues. The panel of judges chose this startup as the winner of MedCity Invest Pop Health’s Pitch Perfect competition.
Oncoustics hopes to turn ultrasound into a better point-of-care screening tool, which is less invasive and less costly than current alternative methods. They work by emitting sound waves, which are then bounced off the tissue and converted into grayscale images.
However, Oncoustics does not just analyze the image itself. It also collects raw signals, including information that was not used to generate images. It plans to use this additional information to reveal new biomarkers and quickly distinguish healthy tissues from diseased tissues.
CEO Beth Rogozinski said in an interview with MedCity News: “There are a lot of signals being discarded, and we have collected all of them.”
This Toronto-based startup was founded in 2018 by Ahmed El Kaffas, who worked on ultrasound data research during his PhD degree in medical biophysics at Sunnybrook Research Institute. He has been studying the acoustic properties of tissues to monitor cancer treatment, when he and Rogozinski discovered that there was a significant unmet need for the detection of liver fibrosis.
“Due to the large amount of unmet needs, we initially focused on the liver,” she said. “The liver is a simple organ imaged by an ultrasound system. First and second, there is a huge and growing demand for liver diseases.”
First, Oncoustics focuses on classifying liver fibrosis through clinical decision support tools, which means that healthcare professionals will ultimately make the final decision. The company is submitting a 510(k) application to the Food and Drug Administration and hopes to start selling its products by 2023. Rogozinski, former chief product officer of Pear Therapeutics, is no stranger to this process because she led the digital health startup through the first approval process.
The good news is that if caught early, non-alcoholic fatty liver can be reversed by changing your diet or losing weight. Many pharmaceutical companies It is also committed to developing treatments for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease).
