Moncton Company, UNB Pioneer Technology To Detect Lung Cancer
MONCTON — Screening for lung cancer could become much simpler thanks to a breakthrough from a New Brunswick company.
Moncton-based Picomole has developed a first-of-its-kind screening tool that makes lung cancer detection as simple as breathing into a tube.
“The fundamental part of our objective is to develop a screening tool for cancer and other diseases and just have, at the patients end of it, a simple breath test,” said Picomole CEO Stephen Graham, in an interview with Huddle.
“Then, when we talk about 10 years from now, you’d be able to go into a pharmacy or your doctor’s office or healthcare clinic and give a breath sample and you’d be able to get screened for a number of different diseases with one breath test. That’s our big goal.”
Picomole’s new technology has three components. First is the breath sampler, which is the part the patient sees. It’s about the size of a microwave and collects the breath samples in slim, stainless steel canisters.
The second component is a spectrometer that processes and measures the amount of light absorbed by organic compounds found in the breath samples. This provides unique digital breath fingerprints and hundreds of biomarkers are provided for each sample collected.
The third component is the machine learning software that analyzes the digital output from the spectrometer to identify the presence of disease. Under the supervision of University of New Brunswick professor Erik Scheme at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and with funding from Mitacs, MSc student Robyn Larracy has been working with the company to identify patterns in the breath data that correspond to diseases and then training computer algorithms to recognize them. Graham says Larracy’s involvement in the project has been crucial.
“We were able to get funding through Mitacs to bring Robyn in. You read everywhere that AI and machine learning is exploding in every different corner of industry,” he said. “These machine learning people, they don’t grow on trees. They’re very specialized and are in high demand. So our association with UNB has been great.”
So far, the technology has proven to identify lung cancer patterns with an 85 percent accuracy rate. Looking ahead, Picomole plans to expand its breath-based screening tool so it can detect other diseases, including breast cancer and Covid-19.
“We’re doing larger studies now to validate the initial results and we expect to see them even better and we’re looking at earlier stage lung cancer as well,” said Graham. “That’s what we’re doing in 2021. We’re doing a proof of concept to say that we can detect breast cancer and on the lung cancer side we’re building a larger model and our intent is to be more accurate than the 86 percent we have now.”
Currently, lung cancer screening involves a low-dose CT scan, which is both cost-prohibitive and difficult to administer on a wide scale. Because of this, many high-risk people don’t get tested. Graham says their technology can make screening far more accessible.
“We’re looking at being able to be more accessible to people essentially anywhere in Canada because our sample could go up into nursing stations up north. It could really get into remote areas,” he said.
“The other part is it would be less expensive and the training for the people taking the samples is much less. We could train a high school graduate in about two hours on how to use the sampler and how to get a valid breath sample from patients.”
Picomole hopes to commercialize its innovation by late 2023 or early 2024.
“What gets us up and what keeps us coming in and working hard is the fact there’s such a huge opportunity to save thousands of lives through detection,” said Graham. “As we expand, it really does have the potential to change how people are diagnosed across a number of different diseases. It’s really exciting and it’s really exciting that we’re doing this in Moncton.”