By applying technology originally developed to determine how aggressive prostate cancer is when present in a person, Anant Madabhushi is now developing a tool to speed up and lower the cost to predict how aggressive a common form of breast cancer is likely to be.
Through his Piscataway company, Ibris Inc., the Rutgers University professor of biomedical engineering is in the process of licensing the imaging technology used to reveal difficult to identify characteristics. The National Institute of Health announced Thursday it has awarded Ibris more than $200,000 through the Small Business Innovation Research program to help Madabhushi establish how well his system predicts long-term patient outcomes.
“In 2007, an oncologist at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Shridar Ganesan, saw our work on prostate cancer imaging and asked if my lab could apply it to (a common form of) breast cancers,” Madabhushi said in the award announcement. “So we applied these techniques and started to get very exciting results.”
Madabhushi said their image-based risk score was in agreement with the Oncotype DX score almost 90 percent of the time. The Oncotype DX test was developed in 2004 to determine whether breast cancer was at the high or low ends of the severity scale. The test is expensive, and takes two weeks to produce results.
The Ibris system can identify the severity of the cancer almost immediately, and eliminates the need to send biopsies to outside analysts, saving money.
“By determining how aggressive the tumor is, we an help those with less-aggressive cancer avoid chemotherapy, with its side-effects and expense, and at the same time, we can help those with more aggressive cancer get immediate access to the treatment they need to fight the disease,” Madabhushi said.
Madabhusi works alongside several former and current students at Ibris, and is working with Ganesan and others on clinical investigations and data projects.
