Comment & Analysis
The Medical Technology industry has exploded in recent years and is one of Europe’s most diverse and innovative sectors. The technologies used include products and services that can be used to improve and even save lives. Like most aspects of engineering, MedTech is all around us. From items as small as plasters to diagnostic procedures such as CT and MRI scans, we use medical technology in our everyday lives. With the evolution of medical technology, we are able to intervene in situations more regularly therefore enabling prevention of disease and injuries in some cases with early detection using these tools. Watching the evolution of this flourishing industry and recognising that MedTech companies invest heavily in developing breakthroughs, gives us hope that in the near future we will continue to save more lives.
The prevalence of cancer in the UK has increased rapidly over the last ten years. As of December 2015, there were an estimated 2.5 million people living with cancer and according to Macmillan (1) this is said to increase by 3% every year and may reach 4 million by 2030. While this is alarming, the number of people who survived five or more years after their diagnosis had increased by 21% in 2015. According to Macmillan, it is predicted that the number of cancer survivors is projected to increase by approximately one million per decade between 2010-2040. The increase is positive however as there is no cure for cancer and it affects so many people throughout the UK and worldwide. Developmental technologies are vital in the fight against cancer.
As this is the general consensus throughout the MedTech industry, there has been ample financial investments made towards the oncology sector and therefore there has been an influx of oncology MedTech start-ups that we have been introduced to over the last 20 years. Many of these companies are situated in Europe and America however this article is going to focus primarily on the UK market.
Fifteen years ago, in March 2006, a group of five physicists and engineers formed the company MDL. The company since has progressed to becoming the world leader in practical optical coherence tomography (OCT) dermatology applications. As their main focus is dermatology, melanoma would naturally be an important focus, especially as there has been an 150% increase in the prevalence of melanoma since the 1970s (3). The company designed their now flagship product the Vivosight Dx which is a state-of-the-art OCT system. The company believes that this product provides clinical information that is ‘not readily available by other means’. MDL stated, ‘We believe OCT provides users with The Whole Picture of skin instead of just part of it’.
Six years later in 2012, the company ‘LightPoint medical’ was formed. LightPoint medical are the leaders in technological precision guided robotic cancer surgery. Technology has come a long way in cancer surgery in the recent years and robotics have helped to improve this. However, surgeons will likely have many years of experience and still tend to be reliant on their own personal skills and eyesight. This allows for human error and a margin of opportunity to miss cancerous cells or remove healthy tissue. LightPoint medical therefore created a product called ‘SENSEI’ which is described as ‘an advanced guidance system designed for radio-guided sentinel node detection and targeted localization’. This device is said to provide a wider field of view and quickly locate potential radioactive hotspots. This robotic probe has the potential to be revolutionary in cancer surgery and assist with increasing accuracy when removing cancerous cells and tumours.
Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T Cell therapies are a fairly new type of technology that has shown very successful remission rates and has been recorded as high as 94% certain cancer types such as leukaemia (4). The purpose of this type of technology is to produce artificial cells and utilise the body’s immune system to fight cancer. T cells are collected from the cancer patient and reengineered in a laboratory where they are genetically engineered to produce the CARS on the surface of the cells (5). T cells are a type of white blood cell that help to fight cancer and infection in our natural immune system. This is a type of immunotherapy (6) which has seen a large increase in recent years. In 2014 Autolus was founded and created their own powerful Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs) or T-cell receptors (TCRs) to reprogramme T cells to recognise and kill the tumour cell. The company provides personalised treatments for ‘specific cancer we are targeting and introduce new programming modules into a patient’s T cells to give those T cells improved properties to better recognise cancer cells and overcome fundamental cancer defence mechanisms.’
‘Cancer isn’t dangerous - unless it’s spreading’ is a quote from the company Pear Bio, founded in 2015. Pear Bio have created a ‘organ on chip’ that recreates how cancer cells behave in their native environment. They then use the collected data to compute the cancer spread using 3D imaging and analyse the potential resistance to drugs, allowing oncologists to find the medication that is most likely to work on the patient. Their description of how the product works states that it ‘combines tissue engineering, microfluidics and biomaterials to represent how drugs are infused, distributed and exposed to the tumour over multiple passes during a chemo or immunotherapy regimen.’ This product could potentially provide a quicker turnaround time for a more successful treatment plan for the patient and can assist with saving many more lives.
One of the more recent MedTech companies, founded only 3 years ago is My Personal Therapeutics which is a London based company offering personalised care to cancer patients. Similarly, this company also focuses on providing personal care plans for individuals and aims to find out what treatment is best for the patient. They use technology known as Personal Discovery Process (PDP) developed by the Icahn School of Medicine from years of clinical research. This process serves as a huge clinical trial for just one patient and with access to around 2000 FDA approved drugs, they use robotics to identify which combinations of drugs would help to treat the patient. This company has collaborated with many other innovative medical companies worldwide and expects to continue to do so in the future.
The companies mentioned are only a few of the MedTech start-ups to be founded in the last 15 years. If you would like to know more about the MedTech industry you can learn more on the ‘Medical Start-ups’ website. You can also keep up to date with the latest Biomedical news and research from the IMechE’s Biomedical Engineering Division (BmeD) here.
- https://www.macmillan.org.uk/_images/cancer-statistics-factsheet_tcm9-260514.pdf
- https://vivosight.com/company/
- https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2020-08-20-150-surge-in-skin-cancer-deaths-since-70s
- https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/car-t-therapy-cancer-review/#:~:text=CAR%2DT%20clinical%20trials%20have,severe%20forms%20of%20blood%20cancer
- https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t-cells
- https://www.england.nhs.uk/cancer/cdf/car-t-therapy/