ProLung
Predictive Analytics for Early Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Smoking cigarettes and tobacco is often regarded as a cult among youths and adults alike in the society. It is no wonder that many fall victims to lung cancer. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), 16 percent of those diagnosed with lung cancer have a life expectancy of five years. It is mainly because 85 percent of them are diagnosed at the later stage. Various studies across the globe predict that the survival rate may increase by five times if it is detected at the early stage. “Lung cancer causes more deaths than the combination of prostate, breast, pancreatic, and colorectal cancers,” asserts Steven C. Eror, the president and CEO of ProLung. Clearly, the need of the hour is to find risk-stratification methods that can assist physicians determine the likelihood of malignancy at much earlier stages. “This is where we come in; our ProLung Test™ is a predictive analytics tool that non-invasively collects bio conductance data from patients with Indeterminate Pulmonary Nodules (IPN) indicating the likelihood of malignancy in the lungs. The data is analyzed to obtain a personalized and predictive tally to indicate if a particular lesion in the lungs is malignant.”

Eror mentions an incident where he was confronted by a woman who was suffering from lung cancer and waited for three years to confirm malignancy in the lungs. The ProLung Test could have been the perfect answer to this situation as it is designed to reduce the wait time drastically from months and years to one day, by performing the test and allows patients to progress toward biopsy and further diagnosis, expanding the therapeutic window. “The tests we do for our patients improve the ability to obtain higher accuracy and performance of our solution.

The ProLung Test is designed to give the physicians and patients the power of knowing now

Furthermore, ProLung can continuously perform additional laboratory developments based on the repository of all the patient data,” says Eror. ProLung’s test is non-invasive, non-radiating, rapid and accurate; thereby, their early detection approach is a significant step forward in the management and treatment of lung cancer. The ProLung Test may also generate remarkable cost savings for CMS by injecting a dose of efficiency to the low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) screen.

The entire group of researchers at ProLung are highly concerned about the delay in care between the time of discovery of an IPN and the official diagnosis. For this purpose, the risk stratification is required for the physician to determine the malignancy of the IPN with a greater degree of certainty. This can take months or even years along with continuous CT scans to identify growth in the nodule that is suspicious to be cancer. To this end, ProLung’s predictive clinical analytics device provides an accurate assessment of the risk of malignancy in the lungs which ultimately increases the survival rates by 5x or 500% by simply accelerating treatment to the earliest stages of the disease rather than the later stages. The pre-surgical evaluation may also lighten the emotional trauma of an individual who has benign nodules through the reduction of futile biopsies and a lenient CT vigilance program.

Looking forward, ProLung is working in the direction of launching its tests across the largest at-risk global population countries like China, U.S., Europe and Middle East. ProLung’s Chief Marketing Officer, Andy C. Robertson has been a major part of the organization’s drive toward global recognition in preparation for commercialization and pursuing a bold strategic initiative to “own the lung.”