Despite early cancer screening helping to save lives, most South Africans on medical aid who qualify for this have not used the benefits, and often get diagnosed late, leading to exorbitantly expensive treatments and reducing survival rates.
Now, reports News24, a local engineer/technology entrepreneur has designed a test that can speed up detection of nine cancer types and help save lives.
If the cancer is caught at stage 1, five-year survival is above 90%, but when found late, treatment is harder, more expensive, and far less likely to succeed, and it’s this gap that his newly SAHPRA-registered blood test aims to close.
Pieter van Rooyen, an extraordinary professor of electrical engineering at Stellenbosch University and co-founder of the company xTenure, which has developed the test, said a single blood sample can now be used to screen for nine high-mortality cancers, including several with no routine screening pathway.
The company uses AI to read a patient’s medical history and identify who is most at risk before a tumour forms. High-risk cases are referred for the blood test, OncoSeek, that analyses seven protein tumour markers alongside age and gender to detect cancer signals across nine types: breast, colorectal, oesophageal, liver, lung, lymphoma, ovarian, pancreatic and stomach.
The public health system routinely screens for breast, cervical, lung, colorectal, and prostate cancer.
“If you find it at stage 1, it’s much easier to get rid of it,” said Van Rooyen, “but at stage 4, it’s a terrible thing, and hugely expensive.”
The latest Health Quality Assessment (HQA) data indicate that preventive screening benefits are under-utilised in South Africa, despite the range of screening and preventive benefits provided by medical aids.
More than 85% of eligible beneficiaries aged 50 to 75 had not been screened for colorectal cancer in the previous five years, while 64% of eligible women had not had a mammogram over the same period. The results draw on data from 7.38m medical scheme beneficiaries – over 84% of the insured population.
HQA CEO Louis Botha said greater member awareness was needed” practitioners can recommend screening, and medical schemes can raise awareness of available benefits.
“Providing screening and preventive benefits is an important first step, but those can only contribute to better health outcomes when people use them,” he said. “There is an opportunity for all parts of the healthcare system – medical schemes, healthcare practitioners and members themselves – to help translate the benefits that are already available into greater uptake.”
Traditional screening relies on biopsy or genomic sequencing, and both are costly.
Van Rooyen said: “Sequencing is extremely expensive, especially in a country like South Africa. So although a good option, this makes it unaffordable in most developing countries.”
The AI engine was trained on 500 000 patient records, identifying diseases that precede cancer to build a personalised trajectory for each patient.
“Our approach is to first look at your medical history and then determine the diseases that are leading up to cancer and which kind of cancer. It’s your specific journey, not just a general population-based average journey,” he said.
“The important thing is that you can then understand who is more at risk, and instead of screening across the whole population, can just focus on the at-risk people.”
Van Rooyen’s path to cancer screening began in electrical engineering. He moved to San Diego in the US 26 years ago to start a wireless chipset company, and the underlying science – information theory, which he describes as detecting signals in noise – transferred directly to genomics.
“Cancer…is the same thing. There’s some signal in your blood or somewhere in your system, and you want to detect it relative to some noise tin the background.”
He previously developed technology for a San Diego-based sequencing company and founded a company that developed DNA analysis tools. He holds more than 500 patents and has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers
South Africa’s healthcare system, heavily burdened by infectious diseases such as HIV and TB, has had less bandwidth for cancer, but Van Rooyen believes preventive tools can ease that burden over time.
“It’s not possible to do cancer screening tests at $1 000 each: the first thing is that it needs to be an affordable option. Then you can come up with all sorts of ideas around motivating people to do it on a more regular, consistent basis. But that’s what we bring to the table – an affordable option.”
News24 article – Can AI catch cancer before it starts? SA-born engineer bets on a blood test
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Blood test option now offered for colorectal cancer screening
Blood test IDs cancer three years before symptoms – US study
Blood test may detect 5 cancers up to 4 years earlier in asymptomatic patients