OncoStem Diagnostics bags Aegis Graham Bell Award in the Innovative Diagnostics category

Recognised for its innovative AI-based prognostic test ‘CanAssist Breast’

OncoStem Diagnostics, an oncology focused company that enables personalised cancer treatment has been recognised as the winner of Aegis Graham Bell Award in the Innovative Diagnostics Category. The award is an initiative by Aegis School of Data Science to honour innovations in IT, Telecom and exponential technologies.

The award is supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India; NITI Aayog; Skill India; and National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI), a Government of India enterprise.

Commenting on the recognition, Dr Manjiri Bakre, CEO and Founder, OncoStem said, “This award is a huge recognition of our exemplary teamwork and we hope this award will help us in our goal to reach every eligible breast cancer patient in India via our government’s universal health scheme – Ayushman Bharat. More importantly, I really hope this award given to many start-ups like ours will help India achieve its goal to become “Aatmanirbhar Bharat” as a nation.

OncoStem’s CanAssist Breast is an innovative, cost-effective test that can help clinicians to plan tailor made treatment for each breast cancer patient based on tumour biology.

The risk of cancer recurrence is dependent on tumour type, stage and on the biology of each patient’s tumour. ‘CanAssist-Breast’ determines the proteomic fingerprint of the tumour. This information is then used by OncoStem’s proprietary machine learning-based algorithm that stratifies patients as ‘low or high’ risk for cancer relapse.

Patients classified as ‘low risk’ of relapse can potentially avoid chemotherapy and its associated side-effects while patients who are at ‘high risk’ of relapse would benefit from the addition of chemotherapy to their treatment regimen. Use of CanAssist Breast thus allows doctors to devise treatment plans that are in tune with the prognosis, maintaining a balance between the benefits and side effects of chemotherapy.