ZumaTek Earns Small Business Innovative Research Grant From National Cancer Institute
Local Duke spin-out receives money to continue work on building 3D imaging technology for earlier detection of breast cancer
Durham, NC — ZumaTek, Inc., a breast imaging company, recently announced it received a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase 1 grant award from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue research on the development of leading-edge dedicated imaging technologies for enhanced 3D lesion detection. The awarded project for one hundred thousand dollars (grant number 1R43CA125924-01A1), which will focus on solving challenges related to imaging the full breast, chest wall, and axillae, was funded for a twelve-month period and could potentially lead to additional funding from an SBIR Phase II award to take the technology closer to commercialization.
"The SBIR Phase I grant money will allow us to focus on the pioneering work that was started at Duke University," said Dr. Randolph McKinley, chief executive officer and the grant's principal investigator. "ZumaTek was formed to commercialize the successful work on these next generation, patient-friendly and information rich scanners so we can get the technology in the hands of the medical community and greatly aid both in the detection of early cancers and the diagnosis and monitoring of disease."
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 180,000 American women will be newly diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, and approximately 41,000 will die from the disease this year. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women in the U.S. Currently, the mammogram is the most widely used tool for breast cancer screening with a market size of $1.5 billion worldwide. ZumaTek's technology has a number of significant advantages over a mammogram. It could replace the mammogram as the primary screening tool for breast cancer detection, and also be used as the primary diagnostic tool in breast cancer patient management.
"We can detect subtle changes in breast cells before a lump can be felt by hand or seen with X-ray mammography", said Dr. Martin Tornai, Zumatek co-founder and associate professor in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at Duke University Medical Center. "Earlier detection is meant to enable doctors to more successfully treat breast cancer before it has formed a tumor or spread to lymph nodes. This is a major advancement that could save lives and improve overall quality of life."
ZumaTek's technology improves a radiologist's ability to detect certain cancers by providing several views of the breast from many different angles and reconstructing the image into a 3D volume set. This enables the detection of tumors that are otherwise hidden by overlapping anatomical structures. Moreover, ZumaTek's technology improves patient satisfaction by avoiding breast compression, which is a painful part of the mammography scanning process. Finally, through its enhanced real-time digital imaging capability, ZumaTek's technology may also be used in conjunction with certain treatments to improve delivery and monitoring of therapeutics.
About the SBIR Award
The SBIR Phase I award number 1R43CA125924-01A1 is made by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
About ZumaTek
ZumaTek, Inc. is a breast imaging company engaged in the development of leading-edge, dedicated imaging technologies for enhanced women's healthcare. ZumaTek was formed by researchers at Duke University Medical Center to commercialize their platform of innovative breast scanners. Over the past several decades, film-screen mammography (film mammography) has greatly aided the detection of early breast cancers. Annual screening of women age 40 and older has lowered breast cancer deaths by as much as 30 percent. Despite theses advances, as many as one in five cancers are still overlooked because the mammographic changes may be very subtle and undetectable by current technologies. ZumaTek's fundamentally novel approach, called mammotomography, is the next logical step for locating and characterizing some of these cancers without the need for more invasive methods.
SOURCE: ZumaTek, Inc.