Startup provides affordable breast cancer screening services to enable early disease detection for the masses in India and other low resource markets
Unitus Seed Fund announced that UE LifeSciences has been selected to join its India StartHealth investment programme. UE LifeSciences has invented a patent-pending, low-cost, portable breast screening device which has potential to save the lives of 10’s of lakhs of women in India through early-stage detection of breast cancer. UE LifeSciences will receive initial funding of Rs 50 lakhs ($80,000), go-to-market support from StartHealth partners Unitus, PATH, Manipal Hospitals, Narayana Health and Pfizer, and potential follow-on investment of at least Rs 1 crore ($160,000).
UE LifeScience’s iBE (intelligent Breast Examination) is a low-cost, portable, patent-pending and FDA approved (Breast Lesion Documentation System) medical device that can be operated by a health worker in a health clinic, a temporary health camp, or at a home. The device is a handheld scanner, is non-invasive, is radiation-free and is very easy to learn to operate. iBE pairs with a smartphone app (via bluetooth) and as the scanning is conducted, scanning results appear on the phone’s screen. The app alerts the health worker if any abnormalities are detected so that she can refer the patient for further evaluation. A screening is expected to be priced as low as Rs 100 (~$1.50) making it affordable to most Indian women.
“We have developed a product that is absolutely suitable for the Indian market; It is non-invasive, painless, accurate and provides results in less than five minutes at the point-of-care. It is potentially THE answer for breast cancer early detection for women in India,” said Mihir Shah, Co-Founder and CEO, UE LifeSciences.
Mihir Shah, UE LifeSciences’ Founder and CEO, has significant experience in developing and commercializing innovative medical devices including NoTouch BreastScan, InfraScan, IQ and Zoe. He co-founded UE LifeSciences in 2009 to develop innovative and yet cost and clinically-effective tools to battle the burden of breast cancer in geographies where incidence is on the rise and where western protocols for screening women is unadoptable or unsustainable.
Prof Matthew Campisi is the Co-founder and CTO at UE LifeSciences. Campisi leads product research and development including electronics design, software, analytics and signal processing aspects. In the past, Campisi has led the product development efforts for various medical devices such as NoTouch BreastScan and Sentinel BreastScan. As an industry professor, he teaches several courses at the Electronics and Electrical engineering department at NYU Polytechnic Institute.