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A Melbourne-based startup is pursuing clinical validation of its chemotherapy dosing AI tool with major hospitals in India and the Middle East as it prepares for regulatory approval filings locally and abroad.
WHY IT MATTERS
Last month, PredicTx Health raised A$1.6 million ($1 million) in investments, which include pre-seed funding from its parent institution, the University of Melbourne, and contributions from angel investors.
Abhijeet Waykar, CEO of PredicTx Health, disclosed to Mobihealth News that the company plans to use its fresh funds to conduct more clinical validation studies, kickstart regulatory approval processes, and further enhance its AI platform.
Currently, PredicTx is completing a prospective study with a few hospitals in India. Waykar also revealed that the company is seeking collaborations with different public and private hospital systems in India, leading cancer centres in the Middle East, and university-affiliated research groups across the Asia-Pacific. "These partnerships ensure our models serve diverse patient populations," he said.
The startup is also preparing to submit technical files to secure a regulatory clearance from Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration and a CE mark under the European Union's Medical Device Regulation for its clinical decision support solution.
"We are also maturing our clinician-facing platform, integrating radiomics and clinical data pipelines, and strengthening the generalisability of our dosing models across tumour types and populations," Waykar added.
PredicTx is also gearing up for commercial pilots across APAC and India in the coming months, as well as integrations into oncology workflows within hospital systems.
"Our mission is to enable oncologists to finally move beyond decades-old body surface area dosing toward personalised, safer, and more effective chemotherapy delivery, using a standard CT scan and AI-powered radiomics," Waykar emphasised.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
PredicTx recently spun out of the University of Melbourne and Western Health to commercialise an AI-powered, precise chemotherapy dosing tool. The technology analyses CT scans and tailors cancer patients' chemotherapy doses based on their body compositions. Trained on CT scan data of over 1,000 colorectal cancer patients at Western Health, the AI tool is said to improve on current dosing methods, which usually take into account a patient's body surface area based on height and weight.
"Our goal is to bring precision chemotherapy dosing into routine clinical practice in a safe, regulated, and evidence-backed way," Waykar said.
The research team behind the chemotherapy dosing tool earlier received A$500,000 in grant funding from the Australian government's Economic Accelerator program. In June, Western Health started testing the AI tool in a clinical setting.
