What problems are you trying to solve?
Treatment of non-COVID health conditions and diseases has been severely impacted during the pandemic.
For instance, cancer tissue biopsies were on hold for several months, delaying diagnosis and treatments for patients. In Ontario alone, it is estimated that cancer surgeries dropped 40 percent in late March and early April compared to the same period in 2019, impacting at least 1,700 patients. Delays will continue even post-pandemic as health systems deal with the backlog in addition to new cases.
What technologies are applied to solve the problem?
Project ACTT — Access to Cancer Testing & Treatment in Response to COVID-19 aims to speed up testing during the pandemic through a minimally invasive DNA test available for cancer patients — an alternative to surgical tissue biopsies.
The project is led by Canexia Health (formerly Contextual Genomics) in partnership with Queen’s University, AstraZeneca Canada, the Eastern Ontario Regional Laboratory Association, Genolife, Semaphore Solutions, emtelligent, Xtract AI, Novateur, and Illumina.
The solution requires only a blood sample from the patient, which is then analyzed by powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to detect fragments of DNA shed by cancer tumors. The current solution will be initially used to detect lung, breast, and colon cancers. Project ACTT will make it possible to detect a broader range of cancer types, increasing the reach from 40,000 to 70,000 Canadian cancer patients each year.
Project ACTT will also test 2,000 patients to determine if the new testing could be delivered under provincial health coverage, making it possible to conduct tests in-house at Canadian hospitals and labs.
Further, through this program, healthcare workers and immune-compromised cancer patients can be protected from COVID-19 exposure because the tests can be delivered remotely. The new tests will also become more available to patients in rural and remote areas.
Technology at Work
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