May 30, 2017 | May featured news, products, and partnerships from around the diagnostics community from numerous companies, universities, and organizations, including Johnson & Johnson Innovation, ClearView, MDxHealth, and more.
Johnson & Johnson Innovation announced 24 new companies have become residents of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS @ Toronto since its grand opening exactly a year ago. The 40,000-square-foot life sciences incubator now hosts a total of 40+ companies, and provides these entrepreneurs shared lab space and offices, modular lab suites and access to scientific, industry, and capital funding experts, all with no-strings attached. The companies represent a range of sectors including pharmaceuticals, medical devices and consumer health solutions with focus areas such as oncology, vision care, genomics, neuroscience, infectious diseases, immunology, and the microbiome. In addition to offering emerging life science companies modular lab units, office space, shared core laboratory equipment, business facilities, third-party services, and educational events, JLABS links the entrepreneurs of Toronto with the full breadth of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, including opportunities for funding, access to research and development experts from medical technology, consumer healthcare product, and the pharmaceutical teams at Janssen. JLABS @ Toronto provides access to scientific, industry, and capital funding experts from across the industry, and operates under the JLABS no-strings attached model, which means resident companies can completely retain their intellectual property and there are no first rights of refusal. Press release
ClearView Diagnostics announced it has been awarded second prize for clinical technology in the inaugural GE Health Cloud Innovation Challenge for its Breast Cancer Ultrasound Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) software. The award recognizes technologies with the greatest potential impact on improving healthcare outcomes as well as those with the best potential to take advantage of and integrate with the GE Health Cloud. ClearView’s AI software leverages a low-cost, portable ultrasound device to distinguish breast cancer from benign/nonthreatening conditions to stop unnecessary procedures and overdiagnosis. The tool uses artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms to help correct a radiologist’s natural biases as they interpret diagnostic images—like a pair of prescription eyeglasses—increasing the effectiveness of radiologists and reducing the need for biopsies. Of the 40 million women in the U.S. who get mammograms each year, approximately 1.3 million are subjected to unnecessary biopsies, follow-ups, and other potentially invasive procedures due to unclear or inconclusive diagnostic results. In an NIH-funded study conducted at USC and UCLA, ClearView’s AI platform was able to accurately identify 100% of breast cancers while reducing the number of benign breast lesions going to biopsy (as recommended by board-certified radiologists) by 70%. Press release
Golden Helix announced a multi-year partnership with Sentieon. This partnership will integrate Sentieon’s secondary analysis tool with Golden Helix software to provide users with a comprehensive solution for genomic data analysis. Sentieon’s suite of secondary analysis tools made significant improvement in runtime over BWA-MEM, GATK, MuTect, and MuTect2 while providing deterministic and identical results. Andreas Scherer, CEO of Golden Helix, wrote, “Sentieon’s secondary analysis pipeline has proven to be powerful to call single nucleotide variations and INDELs for germline and cancer data. It provides significant speed advantages over existing methods, without sacrificing precision and accuracy. Sentieon’s products are highly synergistic with Golden Helix Copy Number Caller VS-CNV. The two products combined provide the most complete secondary analysis solution in the industry. While this solution will benefit all of our users, we are in particular excited for our customers that operate in a high-throughput environment.” Integrating secondary genomic data analysis into Golden Helix’s software stack will allow clinical users to go from a FASTQ all the way to clinical report in one streamlined process, saving time and money. Press release
MDxHealth announced that MediNcrease Health Plans has signed a contract to make ConfirmMDx for Prostate Cancer and SelectMDx(TM) for Prostate Cancer available to 5.5 million covered lives through its clients and payers. Press release
Caris Life Sciences announced the appointment of John Marshall as its Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Marshall will direct the company's oncology research efforts via the Caris Research Institute and guide clinical strategies for innovative precision medicine tools and tumor profiling services, while continuing to serve as Chairman of the Caris Centers of Excellence for Precision Medicine Network (COE Network) on behalf of Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Diagnostics World recently covered Caris’ Molecular Intelligence Test. Marshall brings more than 20 years of experience as a practicing medical oncologist and clinical trial investigator, and is Associate Director for Clinical Care for the Georgetown Lombardi and the Chief of the Division of Hematology-Oncology at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. He is also the founding Director of Georgetown Lombardi's Otto J. Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancer, which is dedicated to realizing the dream of individualized curative therapies through research, care, and advocacy. Press release