Project description
Delivering safe, affordable and timely cancer surgery
Surgery is an important treatment option in cancer care. Unfortunately, often, preoperative examination appears inadequate, resulting globally in 10-60 % incomplete removals of tumour tissue and necessitating repeat operations. This leads to an immense burden on quality of life of patients and enormous additional treatment costs. The solution proposed by the EU-funded Olfactomics Surgery project is an innovative, non-invasive, real-time device enabling analysis of surgical smoke during surgery and facilitating optimal, accurate cancer-occupied tissue removal. The Olfactomics device will be launched for commercialisation and scaled-up, first for breast cancer and then other surgical areas.
Objective
Currently, cancer tumor removal operation is based on preoperative imaging and postoperative pathological examination. There is a strong global trend towards more tissue-sparing and minimally invasive surgery. If all cancer is not removed in the operation, a reoperation is needed, leading to additional costs, impaired cost-effectiveness and impaired quality of life of the patient. The rate of incomplete removal of a tumor ranges from 10-60%.
The breakthrough innovative Olfactomics device allows the surgeon to analyze the operated tissue in real-time during cancer surgery leading to optimal tissue removal without compromising the workflow of the operation and facilitating the use of existing instrumentation. The solution is based on noninvasive, real-time analysis of surgical smoke. The reduced reoperation rate results in significant benefits for the patient, surgeon, hospital and society.
The market potential is high. Easily reachable market for the breast cancer surgery is 850M€ and market for other applicable specialties (such as prostate cancer, skin cancer, and intestinal surgery) is over 2,000M€.
Olfactomics Oy is a Finnish university-based spinoff company founded in 2015 to commercialize the results of over 10 years of clinical and technical research. The team consists of 13 specialists in surgery, medical technology, software, data analysis, financials and law. The team has excellent connections in the international healthcare industry and sensor technology industry.
The technology is currently at TRL 7. The first commercial product for research use will be launched in 2019. This project will focus on scale-up to Olfactomics medical device on breast cancer surgery. The impacts by 2027 include: +3,000 Olfactomics devices sold; +300,000 Olfactomics breast cancer surgeries performed, +70,000 women saved from reoperation, +900M€ costs savings in health care, +100M€ revenue and +200 direct workplaces generated. Scale-up to several surgical areas will follow.
Fields of science
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncologyprostate cancer
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata science
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncologyskin cancer
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinesurgery
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncologybreast cancer
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
33700 Tampere
Finland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.