Green Light for Cancer Drugs Developed by AI Specialist Owkin

Originally published by Pharma Times Online

AI biotech company Owkin has announced that two first-in-class rapid, affordable AI-based diagnostic solutions – designed to improve outcomes for patients with breast cancer and colorectal cancer – have been approved for use in Europe.

Owkin’s RlapsRisk BC and MSIntuit CRC have received approval for diagnostic use across the European Union. By using AI to analyse digital pathology images, they are designed to help clinicians make precision medicine more accessible to more patients at an earlier stage of their disease.

RlapsRisk BC becomes the first CE-IVD approved digital pathology-based AI diagnostic that predicts the risk that early breast cancer patients will relapse. Meanwhile, MSIntuit CRC is the first CE-IVD approved AI solution that enables the identification of microsatellite stable patients from routine histology slides, enabling a significant reduction in the number of diagnostic tests for detecting microsatellite instability (MSI) in clinical practice.

These are the first approved diagnostics products developed by Owkin, which aims to develop more biomarker pre-screening and outcome prediction diagnostics across a range of disease areas. The company’s mission is to join patient care with medical research to discover new mechanisms of diseases and derive better treatments for unmet medical needs.

Meriem Sefta, chief diagnostics officer at Owkin, explained: “Our mission is to use AI to find the right treatment for every patient. Novel drugs allow us to personalise treatments to patients’ individual disease characteristics, promising a new era of precision medicine. But one roadblock that doctors face is finding these patients rapidly, accurately and efficiently.”

“Our first approved diagnostic solutions could help millions of patients with breast or colorectal cancer to receive the therapies they need sooner. This is a crucial moment in Owkin’s mission to use AI to better understand diseases and develop more accurate diagnostics and treatments for patients,” she added.