The Future of Cancer Diagnostics vol. 3
Welcome to the third volume in this cancer diagnostics mini-series! If you haven’t gotten a chance to read parts 1 and 2, you can find them here and here. Remember when I mentioned that having cancer detecting skin patches would be amazing? Well, today I will be reviewing Cyrcadia — a company that develops non-invasive patches for breast cancer detection and monitoring.
Cyrcadia (2014)
The Facts
Cyrcadia was originally founded in 2008 under the name First Warning Systems Inc. by businessman and entrepreneur, Matt Benardis. In 2014, First Warning Systems was re-branded as Cyrcadia with a new focus on wearable early breast cancer screening technology. The company has backing from several angel investor groups and has raised more than $5 Million through Series A funding. Additionally, it holds three patents on its’ wearable technologies and has acquired 510K Class II FDA clearance for its lead product, the iTBra™.
The Technology
The iTBra™ is a bra consisting of two breast patches that detect circadian temperature changes within breast tissue. When worn, the patches actively collect data on temperature irregularities and communicates the information back to Cyrcadia. A machine learning algorithm (seeing a trend here yet?) is then used to predict cancer risk from the gathered data. Recent clinical trials at the El Camino Hospital and Ohio State University demonstrated an 84% breast cancer prediction accuracy after a wearing time of only 2 hours. This result compares very favorably to mammograms, which currently sits at around a 50–65% prediction accuracy depending on the tissue type.
My Perspective
I can’t overstate how excited I am about technologies like this! The main challenge in early cancer diagnostics is simply — no matter how sensitive or specific your method is — it sucks if nobody uses it. Skin patches are noninvasive, discrete, and potentially inexpensive enough that I could actually see use by common people on an ordinary basis. Specifically for Cyrcadia and iTBra™, the potential market is huge. There are over 700 million women worldwide between the ages of 20 and 70. In the United States alone, 38 million mammograms are preformed each year. Furthermore, the unacceptably high false positive rate of mammograms leads to an associated cost of over 4 billion dollars in unnecessary treatments annually in the US. If marketed correctly, iTBra™ is not only just a mammogram alternative, it could dominate the entire market.
The Bottom Line
Cyrcadia sits on a very mature and proven technology that presents a solution to a huge market in which there is no current gold standard. This situation is unique in the startup field and I am very optimistic regarding the future success of iTBra™ and Cyrcadia.
