On Revolutionizing Breast Cancer Screening - HIMSS Europe Series with Alexander Antrobus

We can do a lot better in breast cancer screening. If you're an investor out there or you're a medical device company out there, you should be looking to get involved in this space for the audience.Be breast cancer aware and also be interested in your breast density. Be aware of it. Try learn that information when you can. It really does inform your future risk and your health. My name is Alexander Antrobus.I am the CEO of Zedsen Ltd.

Hello dear listeners, welcome to a new episode of our Heims Europe special series on Narratives of Purpose. This week I bring you interviews with two of the Haims Startup Pitchfest competition finalists in the category Expanding Horizons in Health Equity.These interviews were recorded in Paris a couple of months ago in June at the hims, the Healthcare Information and Management System Society European annual flagship event, also considered as Europe's number one digital health conference. For those of you listening to nine years of Purpose for the first time, my name is Claire Murigande.I am your host on this podcast which is all about amplifying social impact by showcasing unique stories of global change makers who are contributing to make a difference in society. My guest today is Alexander Antrobus.Alexander is the CEO of Zedsen, a technology company with a mission to develop non invasive, affordable and portable medical devices that produce clinically actionable results.Alexander tells me how his company is helping improve breast cancer screening in diverse populations around the world with the device they have built.Alexander also talks about the strong need for innovation in the early detection of breast cancer research, urging investors and medtech companies to get involved in this space.Remember to rate and review our show wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply share your thoughts and feedback on the Narratives of Purpose website using this short link bit ly Narratives of Purpose then select the review page. For now, get comfortable and let's begin the conversation with Alexander.

I am the CEO of Zsen Limited which is a London based medical device startup and we are building a novel breast cancer screening system to make breast cancer screening accessible, affordable and comfortable.

So what are your expectations from this Congress? You'll be here the three whole days or just today?

I will be here for about two and a half days.I think my expectations are to network a little bit, to find potential strategic partners, to learn a little bit about where the kind of enthusiasm is in the European med tech space. Maybe to find some potential service providers to help us, particularly on like our app development side.We're a real kind of hardcore engineering core tech company, but we're going to have to Build apps, et cetera, a little bit further down the line. And so, you know, kind of simply looking for the right partners to partner with those types of things.

So let's come to Zedsen. What is it exactly and what are you trying to solve with your company?

So Zedson, at its core, is a tech company. And we have a couple, two things in our. In our portfolio, effectively, we have a group of patents around bioimpedance sensing.And so this is a technology that allows you to kind of measure the electrical properties of a volume of tissue, and then we can tell a bunch of things from those electrical properties. So I think you could think of it as the hardware patents around detecting the electrical properties.And then we have a bunch of fancy kind of algorithmic techniques for extracting clinical information out of those measurements. And our first application that we're driving towards right now is in the breast cancer detection space.So we identified that breast cancer is a really good initial application because it's a huge problem. It's a really widespread cancer.Even though there are gold standard existing measurement modalities like mammograms and ultrasounds, etcetera, not enough women are accessing these early enough. They're not appropriate for every woman. So different women have very different breast morphology.And this means that mammography, for example, doesn't work so well in women with high breast density.So there are a lot of pain points in that whole workflow that result in too many women not getting diagnosed early enough and therefore having bad health outcomes.So our form factor allows our device to be used in primary care, which means women don't have to wait for weeks and weeks and weeks to get access to a radiology unit to get that mammogram.It's also, the tech is kind of designed to be better in dense breast tissue, because dense breasts have actually better electrical properties in some sense. So the application works really well in that space.And then it's small, it's compact, so primary healthcare providers can do the assessment themselves. And there's no clamping or squeezing or pressure or discomfort.So it's amazing how many women miss mammograms just because of the discomfort and the pain. I mean, it's almost 50%. And that's mad, right? If you consider that we're talking about screening for a potentially terminal disease and.

You were here pitching this morning, how did that session go?

Yeah, it went really well. It was a lot of fun. It was quite intense.It only gave us five minutes to speak, and then a whole five Minutes for questions from the judges panel and then questions from the audience. So it was a pretty intense format, but I thought the other pictures were really good. All the companies were really interesting.They were really confident speakers. They'd put a lot of time into the presentations. So all in all, I thought it was a really fun session and it was quite cool to.They do a audience vote right there and then in the room. Oh, really Let you know the audience vote outcome. So that's quite. That's quite like. Drumroll, please. Vibes.

There's something I want to read on your website when I was checking what ZSEN is about. It says that your scanners are affordable, portable and make it unique to be used by GP and community clinic settings.That's exactly what you were mentioning before. But something else caught my eye. It says that you'll be capable with this technology to to analyze not only dense tissue, but also enables better care for women of color and younger women. I had this conversation last year with someone who was radiotherapist and she worked a lot with all types of cancer and especially breast cancer.She was surprised to see that very young women are diagnosed and most of the time it takes too much time actually, because even their physician don't think they can have it because they're too young. So how is your solution going to help with that?

Yeah, so that is really true and we don't really understand why, but breast cancer, and in fact many cancers are being found earlier and earlier in populations around the world. And there's a lot of debate right now as to what the reason is, but it's definitely happening, which is very concerning.And as you say, many health systems around the world have a threshold of about 50:45 where they start screening women for breast cancer. Now, there's two reasons for that. One is simply because they don't expect young women to have it, so they're not screening them.But another is that younger women tend to have higher breast density. So there's also a logic of, well, what's the point in screening you earlier if we can't see anything? Right.So this is where new technologies that hopefully can see more and are worth screening younger women. That's where these technologies are really important. So, yes, we do hope that a, we can make it cheaper to access screening.So, you know, part of the issue is congestion in radiology units. If you can do screening outside of a radiology unit, then we can screen more people.And if we can screen people with dense breasts more accurately, then we can also screen more People because it makes sense to screen people with dense breasts. So those are two pain points that we hope to alleviate with our technology and that will help younger women, we hope.But breast density also varies quite a lot across different demographic groups. So South Asia, particularly in East Asia, have a much higher prevalence of dense breast tissue. African population slightly lower.Well, again, depending where you are on the world.But among African American communities, for example, it seems like there, it's more a social issue of why people aren't accessing mammograms, aren't going for them. I think there's an issue around pain and discomfort, et cetera.But yeah, the broad answer here is that we definitely need novel screening methods for different demographic groups.I know of a company based in South Africa, for example, that is basically solving the problem of current mammography is really designed around European populations and it just doesn't perform as well in African demographics for a bunch of different reasons. So they're doing, you know, African faced mammography.So I think there's just a lot of scope for, for innovation and improvement in the whole screening space for breast cancer. And it is so prevalent, it is the most prevalent cancer hands down, even if you include men.So, you know, even if you, if you include whole global population, there's still more women getting breast cancer on average than there are men and women getting any other cancer.

And how does the landscape look like? You just mentioned this South African company. But who are your competitors right now and where do you position yourself in this market?

Yeah, it's a hot market, right, because it's, it's big. But there's a couple of. So I'd say a lot of new technologies in the space are focusing on making existing modalities more efficient.So you'll see a lot of computer vision, AI applications on mammogram, on ultrasound, etc. That's great and I think there's a lot to be done there.But that doesn't solve the issue of like, mammograms are still reasonably hard to access because of the volumes of people trying to get there, etc. So there are applications like ours. So we are based on this concept called bioimps.There's not many players in that space, but there's three or four others who are dabbling in this kind of technology. And we've each got different kind of strengths and weaknesses.Some people are going for like a more comprehensive scan, but they have to build a much bigger scanner and the whole scanning procedure takes much longer. We've opted for a smaller, compact design and a slightly quicker scanning routine, but then we get slightly less information.So we have to use a bunch of clever machine learning tricks to kind of get the best we can out of that. So, you know, we're all going for our own competitive. I think our real defining traits are that we are compact, affordable, comfortable.Those are our real three competitive advantages. And then the other space where there's work is thermographic imaging.So using infrared cameras, heat detective cameras to also assess the presence or absence of cancers. That's also potentially very low cost and, and quite promising in a way, but they struggle with depth penetration.So cancers that are quite deep or larger breast sizes, I think they struggle there. So I don't know of any devices yet that have made it through regulatory proceedings that are based on that technology.But that's the high level of the space.

And final note, what was your message or what did you want the audience to take away from your pitch this morning and can you share that with our listeners?

What I want them to take take away is that we can do a lot better in breast cancer screening.So if you're an investor out there or you're a medical device company out there, you should be looking to get involved in this space to take some of that market share, to invest in upcoming companies or upcoming technologies. I think that was the takeaway of my pitch. I think my takeaway for the audience is be breast cancer aware.If you're a woman, make sure you examine yourself. If you're a partner, encourage your partners to examine themselves and also be interested in your breast density.So breast density is this physiological fact about your breasts. You can't tell anything about your breast density just by looking at them right. Or handling them. You just can't.It's something that can really be measured by a mammogram or by technology like ours or to some extent by some of the more modern ultrasounds. But be aware of it. Try learn that information when you can. It really does inform your future risk and your health. So be breast cancer awareness.That's our kind of message to everyone.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

If you wish to learn more about Alexander's and his team's work at ZSEN, check out their website at zedsen.com that's Z-E-D-S-E-N.com. you can also follow their activities on LinkedIn. As always, all the links are available for you in the show notes.Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today.Join me again in a couple of days for the second episode featuring another HIMSS Startup Pitchfest Competition finalist in the category Expanding Horizons in Health Equity. I will speak to Piotr Kruszynski, the founder and CEO of Feyenally. Until then, take care of yourselves. Stay well and stay inspired.