'C The Signs': Early Cancer Detection Using AI

0:00Carol Massar:Is your multi-entity management creating more confusion than clarity? You need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite. It's the AI-native ERP solution that's powerful, painless, and proven. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, we may have mentioned this before, but I got to say it bears worth repeating. It came from Bloomberg's Jessica Nix, who reported this out earlier this year, that more Americans are living with cancer as death rates continue to decline thanks to improved detection methods and better treatment options.

0:47Carol Massar:And there's some stats around this. Yeah, check this out. Seven of 10 people survived for five years after a diagnosis. That was between 2015 and 2021. Across all cancers, it's a key goal of therapy. That's according to the American Cancer Society's annual report. Carol, this improvement extended to more aggressive types with higher survival rates for myeloma, liver, and lung cancers compared with decades prior, according to the report. So some good news. Yeah, some good news, right? This is what we want to be hearing. Hey, let's get to our Business Week women's health segment. We focus on key issues in developing technologies impacting the present and future of women's health around the world because as we've been talking about over the last year or so, there are gaps between men and women when it comes to health care and diagnosis.

1:30Carol Massar:Joining us from Boston is Dr. B. Bakshi. She's co-founder and CEO of See the Signs, and she joins us. So great, Dr. Bakshi, to have you here with Tim and myself. Tell us about your backstory because being a junior doctor in the emergency room and seeing a certain patient and how that kind of got you to where you are today and why we're having this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And thanks so much for having me today. So cancer is something that I think touches all of us from either experiencing personally as like a family member, a friend or colleague, we've all kind of experienced a loss of cancer.

2:05And as a junior doctor, and then later when I specialized in primary care, I treated and cared for a lot of patients who had a cancer diagnosis. And sadly, more often than not, I saw patients actually die prematurely from a cancer diagnosis. And it just happened to be a really light bulb moment for me quite early on in my career was when I was doing a shift in the emergency room. And I had a patient who'd come in where they had seen their own provider over the course of six months with accelerating symptoms. And it was one of the things that they kept going back and kept being reassured. They did have some tests, they were put on some treatment.

2:39But at the same time, their symptoms were getting worse, and they ended up in the ER, which is when I met them. And it was a really sad story where I spent the night with this one patient. And it transpired that he had pancreatic cancer, and it just spread everywhere. And it was in giving this news to him that I was surprised and taken back from his reaction where he never really had an issue with the cancer, but kind of threw back to me as, you know, as a patient, I had done all the right things, I'd gone back to get care, I was worried things were getting worse, I kept going back to see my doctor, but the system failed me.

3:13And it wasn't really the fact that he had cancer, but why was the cancer diagnosed so late? And what we know when it comes to late cancer diagnosis, it's really the difference between life or death for many patients, where an early stage detection, for example, in bowel cancer, over 90 % of patients survived 10 years or more from bowel cancer, compared to less than 10 % who are diagnosed in the very late stages. so in doing so and kind of seeing this experience really firsthand it really made me reflect to say well how are patients diagnosed with cancer and what more can we do as both a health system as doctors and as a society to move diagnosis upstream so we can capture patients and all patients earlier in their diagnostic journey there are so many uh elements to this it has to do with coverage, health insurance, technology, support or lack thereof when it comes to research.

4:06And those are the tensions that I want to talk about. And I'm just curious, given how fast technology is moving, but also at the same time seeing funding pulled by the federal government here in the United States for a lot of research, does it leave us in a place that the technology can make up for that lack of funding? Are you still optimistic about things moving forward? So what we're really excited about at See the Science is we're using artificial intelligence and analyzing electronic health record data to predict if someone is at risk of cancer. So if you think about how traditionally over the last 20, 30, 50 years we've approached cancer, we've been really just testing people to try and see how we can find cancer.

4:46And many screening programs, as you'll know, are quite invasive, especially the ones for women when it comes to breast screening or cervical screening. and that's the first entry point in where patients generally feel what feel well but we test them to try and find the cancer early we've never had more of a precise or personalized way to do it and what see the science has been working on we're really excited about all the success we've had in the uk's national health service is we've been able to accurately predict when a patient is at risk of cancer purely through looking at their data that sits in their electronic health record and collecting data directly from patients.

5:20So you can imagine from the idea of having to test people in an evasive way every one, two or three years compared to having a software that runs continuously in the background of your electronic health record and can help flag when you're now at risk of cancer and get you into the right care you need and make sure you undergo the right tests and investigations. So we're really excited about the power AI has when it comes to early cancer diagnosis. and in the UK we've assessed over 500 ,000 patients through this method and helped to detect 75 ,000 patients with cancer across over 100 different cancer types purely through this approach and like for like you talked about coverage and you talked about health insurance you can imagine taking an AI based approach significantly cheaper than if we had to scan everyone in the population or test everyone in the population so one of the things that we really are excited about is AI to be able to deliver early cancer detection, but in democratizing access and reaching those patients in those rural geographies, but also really thinking about how we can bring costs down substantially.

6:25So cancer and cancer care is one of the most expensive cost drivers we have, both for CMS, but also for commercial payers.

6:32Carol Massar:Dr. Bakshi, you just have about two minutes. I would love to talk so much about this. Where's the choke point in getting this actually done? because I think about there's a whole massive business in treating people with cancer. But if we could get it earlier detected, it would certainly impact that business. And I think most would think that that's a good thing because early detection can lead to much, much better outcomes. But I'm just curious. So what's the sticking point here? I mean, is the data there that this actually is effective work? Should you catch it earlier for people and this just makes sense or what's holding it back?

7:05Carol Massar:Yeah, absolutely. So we have demonstrated a 36 % stage shift from moving it from stage three stage four to stages one and two where it's localized and treatable we've also seen a 99 sensitivity for cancer so capturing all patients with cancer in the population but more importantly when you say around the chokehold i think up until now a lot of the investment has been in late stage treatment so we spent about 150 billion on late stage treatment so that's a huge cost savings we can have if we can reduce the burden of that and move diagnosis upstream to early detection. But the other benefit, and I'll mention this now, because I'm speaking to Bloomberg, is purely on thinking about the working age population.

7:45Cancer is the leading cause of premature death across all age groups. Those are people being taken out of the workforce, taken out of employment. These are taxpayers that are taken out. So there's not only just the benefit to patients, but it's the economic benefit to society and helping patients live longer with cancer.

8:00Carol Massar:Yeah. I mean, there's so much. Come back soon. Love to hear how this thing is progressing because I think you are preparing, as you've said, or I'm looking at our notes to bring this See the Signs to the United States. So curious about how this is going to progress. We got to run. Dr. B. Bakshi, she's co-founder and CEO of See the Signs joining us right here. Having seen family members with cancer, early detection is a make or break. I mean, it's often. It's omnipresent in our lives. Truly. That's what it is. It's the big, I think, healthcare nut that is, you know how to treat it, but tough to crack.