Experts advocate for lung cancer screening

/in , /by

Lung cancer experts emphasised the need for improved screening protocols to enhance early detection and reduce mortality rates across the Nordic region.

Specialists convened at the “Lung Cancer Symposium – Early Diagnosis & Screening, Benchmarking the Nordics,” organised by Oslo Cancer Cluster, NTNU, and Levanger Hospital last week, to discuss the latest advancements and challenges in lung cancer screening. The event focused on the importance of early detection and the need for standardised screening practices across the Nordic countries.

Watch the symposium:

The importance of early detection

Presenters at the symposium underscored that lung cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer mortality worldwide.

According to Oluf Dimitri Røe, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, NTNU/Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Oncology, Levanger Hospital: “Lung cancer has the highest incidence and mortality rate globally,” which highlights the importance of effective screening.

Research shows that screening with low-dose CT scans can reduce mortality by 20-24%. However, there is no universal consensus on the best screening method, which remains a significant challenge in implementing these programs.

Current screening practices and their limitations

David Baldwin, MD, PhD, Professor, Nottingham University Hospital, shared insights into implementing the targeted lung health check program in the UK, which has shown success in early detection. “We’ve shown that screening can be both effective and cost-efficient,” Baldwin noted. The UK model has detected thousands of cases at earlier stages, particularly in high-risk groups, demonstrating the potential impact of targeted screening.

However, identifying the most appropriate population for screening remains a challenge. Røe pointed out that using the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) criteria would mean “excluding 74% of those who will get lung cancer,” indicating that current selection methods may not be sufficiently inclusive.

Addressing smoking among young people

Smoking was identified as a significant risk factor, with concerns raised about its prevalence among young people. Røe noted that “more than half of adolescent smoking is attributable to watching smoking in movies.” This suggests a need for targeted interventions to prevent smoking initiation among younger populations, which could reduce lung cancer incidence over time.

Innovative approaches to smoking cessation

Finland introduced an innovative approach to support smoking cessation through a mobile app. Jussi Koivunen, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy, The Oulu University Hospital, reported that the app helped a substantial proportion of participants quit smoking, with 20% of users becoming non-smokers within six months. These results indicate that digital tools can be an effective addition to lung cancer prevention strategies.

Next steps for the Nordic region

The symposium highlighted the need for tailored lung cancer screening programs across the Nordic countries. The Norwegian representative stressed the importance of adapting approaches to each country’s healthcare system, stating, “We have to learn from others, and we have to tailor every screening program to our country.”

The discussions at the symposium indicate that a coordinated approach to lung cancer screening, alongside smoking prevention and cessation initiatives, could significantly improve early detection and treatment outcomes in the Nordic countries.

AI – a game changer in cancer

/in , /by

Artificial intelligence brings endless opportunities, but can it contribute to tackling healthcare challenges caused by a rapid aging population and an increase in complex disease?

This question was asked at a recent conference titled Intelligent Health, organised by Oslo Met, Oslo Cancer Cluster and Akershus University Hospital. The event brought together over 200 live participants and 100 on streaming, including students, academics, and practitioners from across a number of institutions and companies, with the purpose of discussing, understanding, and sharing.

The talks covered a wide range of topics, from using AI in the development of personalised health, to prevention and treatment of different diseases. Several presentations focused on AI solutions in the oncology sphere, including prevention, drug development and treatment optimisation.

Watch the recording of the conference here: The Intelligent Health conference 2024 – FilMet (oslomet.no)

Creating digital twins

Arnoldo Frigessi, professor at the University of Oslo, presented Digital twin for personalized treatment: example from breast cancer. Frigessi outlined an “in-silico approach” to personalised treatment. By using all available data of the patient, he described how to make a digital twin and simulating different treatment options.

“The fundamental idea is to produce copies of the unique patients on a computer. When we have a lot of copies of the patient we can treat each copy with a drug or a different dose and compare them in-silico on a computer to see which one of the drugs works better. This is the in silico approach to personalised treatment,” Frigessi stated.

The simulation is still far from being used in a clinical setting, due to time constraints, but gives a view of what personalised cancer treatment may look like in the future.

Arnoldo Frigessi, professor at the University of Oslo. Photo: Thea Larsen Ørneseidet, Oslo Met

Improving screening strategies

Oluf Dimitri Røe, professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, covered the clinician’s perspective: The role of AI in predicting lung cancer. Røe introduced how a new machine-learning model can improve the selection of participants to lung cancer screening.

“Yearly screening with CT scan could reduce the mortality of lung cancer with 20%, however, in the NLST study they found that only 26% of everyone that got lung cancer had been included in the study. This was due to the smoking criteria they used. So we need new models for selecting people for lung cancer screening.

“One of the machine learning models is the Hunt Lung Cancer Risk Model, which was published in 2018. We used backwards feature selection on 36 variables that we picked out from the Hunt data bank. The main thing is that we could with a simple calculator get a very high AUC value, higher than the PLCO in our population,” commented Røe.

Predicting treatment outcome

Tero Aittokallio, group leader of Computational Systems Medicine in Cancer, Dept. of Cancer Genetics, Oslo University Hospital gave the researcher’s perspective: AI for treatment optimization in pancreatic cancer and hematological malignancies. Aittokallio talked about building multimodal AI to predict treatment outcome in pancreatic cancer.

“This is based on data that we collected in a Horizon 2020 project for the last four years. Most of the time has been spent collecting data from different hospitals in Europe, such as liquid biopsies and surgery. We are using genomics, pathology, MRI imaging, radiology, and then the idea is that we are combining this data using AI models and using this information to select the right treatment for the individual patients.”

Tero Aittokallio, group leader, Oslo University Hospital. Photo: Thea Larsen Ørneseidet, Oslo Met

Identifying new drug targets

Amine Namouchi, Principal Scientist in Nykode Therapeutics, represented the industry’s perspective with The role of AI in creating personalized cancer vaccines. Namouchi described how Nykode has developed AI models to detect novel drug targets for development.

“For the case of cancer vaccine development, our starting point is of course the patient. From the patient, we have a blood sample and a tumour biopsy sample. We perform the DNA and the RNA sequencing, and HLA typing, to know exactly what MHC class I are expressed at the surface of this particular patient. Then we apply our method and our algorithm to select and rank those neoantigens, and the platform is called NeoSELECT,” said Namouchi.

Namouchi then described how the company identifies the neoantigens that bind to the MHC molecule, by using an artificial neural network.

Amine Namouchi, Principal Scientist in Nykode Therapeutics. Photo: Thea Larsen Ørneseidet, Oslo Met

Oslo Cancer Cluster

Together at Nordic Life Science Days

/in , /by

1400 participants from 30 countries gathered in Malmö, Sweden for this year’s Nordic Life Science Days, 18-19 September. The Norwegian ecosystem shared a pavilion at the conference.

The two-day conference is the largest Nordic partnering conference dedicated to the life science industry and is organised annually. It started in 2013 to create a unique place to do business, and Oslo Cancer Cluster has been a partner and supporter of the conference since the beginning. For several years, Oslo Cancer Cluster has organised a common pavilion with the other Norwegian stakeholders to promote Norwegian life science companies in the Nordics.

“Oslo Cancer Cluster helps to assure a Norwegian presence at Nordic Life Science Days each year. By working together with fellow clusters, public and private partners, with support from The Norwegian Embassies in Denmark and Sweden, and Innovation Norway, the collective effort provides valuable access to wider networks, expertise, and opportunities for companies to innovate. It also strengthens Norwegian interests across the Nordics and helps each of us make a positive impact. Together, we can make a difference”, said Charlotte Wu Homme, Head of Membership and Events at Oslo Cancer Cluster.

 

A large group of people in front of a white house with blue skies above.

A kick-start to the conference was held the day prior at the Residence of the Norwegian Ambassador in Copenhagen. Oslo Cancer Cluster was honoured that Ambassador Katja Nordgaard hosted the event and spoke on the importance of cooperation and innovation. Photo: Innovation Norway in Denmark

 

Woman in front of camera in a video setting.

Katja Vetvik, CEO of the Norwegian start-up and Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator company Thelper, was interviewed by Oslo Business Region during the conference. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

Bjørn Klem, CEO of Norwegian start-up and Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator company Adjutec Pharma, gave a company presentation at NLSDays this year. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

Man on a stage in front of screen and audinece.

Torbjørn Furuseth, CEO of the start-up and Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator company DoMore Diagnostics, participated in the Nordic Star 2024 Pitch Competition during the first day of the conference. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

People in front of a conference stand saying "Norway Pioneering Sustainable Health Solutions - Together!"

The Norwegian pavilion at NLSDays 2024 was home to the entire Norwegian life science ecosystem, Team Norway. The partners on the stand were Oslo Cancer Cluster, The Life Science Cluster, Norway Health Tech, Norwegian Smart Care Cluster, LMI, NorTrials, Inven2, Oslo Business Region, Innovation Norway, and the Norwegian embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm, as well as industry partners Curida Diatec, Theradex Oncology, Precision Health AI. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

NLSDays is owned and organised by SwedenBIO. Next year’s conference will be in Gothenburg. Learn more at www.nlsdays.com.

 

A tool for targeted chemotherapy

/in , /by

A new test aims to identify which cancer patients benefit from being treated with antibody drug conjugates.

The Norwegian start-up company Rab Diagnostics is developing a tool to improve targeted chemotherapy. The test will identify which cancer patients can benefit from antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).

“There is an unmet clinical need for better tools to stratify cancer patients as responders or non-responders to ADC treatment,” says Anette Weyergang, co-founder and CEO of Rab Diagnostics, a spin-out from Oslo Universiy Hospital admitted to Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator (OCCI).

Finding the right patients

ADCs represent a prominent class of anticancer therapeutics that bring hope to incurable cancers. Since the first ADC was approved in 2000 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 11 more ADCs have received market approval worldwide, 8 of these since mid-2019. Furthermore, over 100 ADCs are currently being investigated in clinical trials. Thus, these anti-cancer drugs are leading a new era of targeted cancer therapy.

“These drugs are targeted chemotherapy, consisting of an antibody linked to a chemotherapeutic drug. The antibody is designed to find the cancer cell while the chemotherapy shall kill it. In this way, ADCs are constructed to bring the chemotherapy to the cancer cells and leave healthy cells unharmed. However, the full clinical potential of these targeted drugs remains to be realised as there is a substantial difference in treatment efficacy between patients, causing unsatisfactory objective response rates (ORRs) down to only 25%. The problem is, we do not know which patients to treat,” says Weyergang.

Founded on Norwegian research

This is where Rab Diagnostics comes in. The company was founded in August 2023 by three researchers at Oslo University Hospital after studies showed that RabGTPases, a family of proteins, can be used as biomarkers to predict if ADCs will work.

“We have made key achievements showing that our technology is valid for different ADCs and cancer indications, and we have shown that our biomarkers can be evaluated on both protein- and RNA levels, which provides flexibility for our products in the pipeline. They have also verified our technology in three independent clinical cohorts,” says Weyergang.

Some of these achievements were published in Nature Communications in 2021 and set the ground for a patent family. The company has developed a strategy to commercialise its first product and generated a business plan to reach this goal. In July 2024, Rab Diagnostics also received the “Seal of Excellence” from the European Innovation Council.

An emerging market opportunity

In the age of personalised cancer medicine, many patient stratification tools and diagnostics tests are entering the oncology market. However, the competition for biomarkers in the ADC space is still relatively low.

“Our competitors consist of companies developing stand-alone diagnostics and companion diagnostics. None of these offers a solution where RabGTPases are used to predict ADC treatment decisions, thus we have no direct competitors,” says Weyergang.

Rab Diagnostics aims to pioneer a new proprietary class of biomarkers, that will unlock the full potential of the rapidly evolving class of ADCs. The company has already received interest from the oncology milieu and had discussions with industry experts from pharma and healthcare companies who have confirmed interest in the technology.

For several cancer indications

The company’s first product is a diagnostic test for breast cancer patients legible for an ADC called T-DM1. As this product is focused on one ADC in a subset of breast cancer, the commercial opportunity is limited.

“Launching this first product is, however, a strategic move as it serves the important task of getting traction for our other diagnostic tests in the pipeline covering several ADCs and cancer indications with a tremendous commercial opportunity. Utilising RabGTPases as ADC biomarkers offers a new way of thinking when it comes to finding the right patient,” says Weyergang.

Rab Diagnostics’ strategy includes fast commercialisation of its first product to educate the market to use Rab proteins to guide ADC treatment decisions.

The story behind Rab

Rab Diagnostics was initiated as an innovation project at Oslo University Hospital and admitted to the SPARK Norway innovation program, where it was awarded the Vaccibody Innovation Award 2023. SPARK provided mentoring and financial support to engage with pharma representatives and investors and supported the first market analysis. The program also provided entrepreneurial education of high value for further development towards commercialisation.

“The innovation project was then admitted to the Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator who gave mentoring and guidance to set up the company together with financial support from Radforsk. Oslo Cancer Cluster and its Incubator have continuously supported Rab Diagnostics with advice and have used their network to promote the company and connect them with key stakeholders in the field,” says Weyergang.

 

 

The series The Start-up Spotlight and The Scale-up Spotlight are produced in collaboration between the Norwegian health clusters: Norway Health Tech, Oslo Cancer Cluster, The Norwegian Smart Care Cluster, The Life Science Cluster and Biotech North. The initiative was funded by Viken fylkeskommune. Please contact us, if you wish to have your company to be featured.