AI-MICADIS

Need – Each year, over 8M people die of cancer and now the World Health Organization is urging governments to accelerate action to reduce premature mortality. The stage of a cancer progression at the time of diagnosis is strongly associated with patient survival. Unfortunately, the current diagnostic tests and screening tools have very disappointing accuracy rates and many patients remain undiagnosed.

Solution – Artificial Intelligence Expert (AIE) is a Romanian start-up company with a ground-breaking solution that will enable early diagnoses and screening for a wide variety of cancers. AIE aims to leverage the fast transition to liquid biopsies, microarray and next generation sequencing (NGS) for molecular diagnostics. AIE can detect cancer at the earliest stages by using circulating microRNAs instead of the commonly used circulating tumour DNA or circulating cancer cells. AIE is developing an extremely accurate diagnostic tool for detection of the earliest stages of cancer progression using powerful Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence to analyse microRNA profiles from microarray and next generation sequencing (NGS) data.

Market opportunity – The fast increase of big data collection and the associated need to extract knowledge from it drives the AI in healthcare market, which is growing at a CAGR of 53% to $8B by 2022. This market growth is fuelled by a strong growth of the NGS diagnostic market, which is growing at a CAGR of 73%.

Competition – The competition is focusing on optimizing currently used circulating tumour DNA detection tools and simpler machine learning models, that extract a small number of meaningful biomarkers. This keeps the competitor’s data processing needs low, but infringes on the tests’ accuracy and sensitivity.

Feasibility assessment – AIE will use the SMEi phase 1 funding to identify partnerships, perform user involvement study, set out a regulatory path, and optimize the best business strategy to bring the AI-MICADIS to the market.