In the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a team of doctors are temporarily ‘miniaturised’ to microscopic size, along with the deep-sea submarine in which they are to travel, in order to enter the body of a patient and perform intricate life-saving surgery. It’s a story familiar to many of us, due in large part to numerous parodies since its release, but it also highlights a persistent challenge facing surgeons. Even in today’s technology-filled world, they are shackled to the limitations of their own human body in high-pressure situations that are, quite literally, life and death for their patient.
This is particularly troubling in the case of breast cancer. In addition to the severe emotional and physical distress of diagnosis and surgery, around 30% of women require follow up operations due to the difficulties in removing all of the cancer in the first instance. When you consider that one woman is diagnosed every 16 seconds, repeat surgeries are devastating for an enormous number of patients and cost health care systems billions of dollars.
Inspired to address this problem using his research expertise, biomedical engineer Associate Professor Brendan Kennedy from UWA’s Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering and Head of BRITElab at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, collaborated with renowned breast cancer surgeon Professor Christobel Saunders AO, Head of Division of Surgery at UWA Medical School, to invent a revolutionary new imaging technology.
The UWA breakthrough, which led to the creation of Perth-based, medtech start-up OncoRes Medical, is a handheld imaging probe that enables surgeons to translate their sense of touch into high resolution images during surgery. It’s a giant leap forward from what surgeons currently rely on to identify and remove cancerous cells – their sense of touch and eyesight.
“When you’re actually in the surgery, the surgeon is often just relying on their eyesight and their fingers to determine if they’ve got all of the cancer out,” says A/Prof Kennedy. “I find it incredible as an engineer that we’ve got all of this marvellous technology in the world but when it comes to such a critical decision in a surgery, the surgeon is still using what they were using hundreds of years ago.”
By performing this innovation during surgery, the tool makes it possible to perform accurate surgery on a microscopic level, increasing the likelihood of removing all cancerous tissue, decreasing the need for re-incision and leading to better patient outcomes. It’s something backed up by the 90-patient study undertaken at Fiona Stanley Hospital that found it to be 95% accurate.
With this impressive result, a growing list of accolades, including winning Pitch@Palace Global in 2018, taking out the Tech23 Greatest Potential Award and the Emerging Company Award at the AusBiotech and Johnson & Johnson Innovation Industry Excellence Awards in 2019, and recent success in the prestigious US MedTech Innovator Accelerator program, the project is now tackling it’s next big challenge – raising the required funds to continue to commercialise the technology, go through the approvals process at the US Food and Drug Administration and run a full clinical trial. The potential is huge and Dr Kennedy sees his invention as a platform technology, able to move beyond breast cancer toward brain cancer, lung cancer and a range of different diseases.
Brendan Kennedy is the program chair for Biomedical Engineering at UWA. Click here to learn more about studying Engineering at UWA. For more information about OncoRes Medical, to offer feedback or if you would like to discuss providing support for similar ground-breaking research projects, please contact development@uwa.edu.au.
Author: Jayden Worts | Cover photograph: Matthew Galligan