Breast cancer awareness month ends - the work must continue

Last week the entire Kheiron team showed up to our weekly all hands call in an array of bright pink. It was inspiring to see it and reminded me that I’m privileged to work with a group of people who are all dedicated to our mission of giving any woman, anywhere a fighting chance against breast cancer.

It was to mark the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an initiative led by Breast Cancer Now, which has become an important global awareness campaign as breast cancer is still the most common cancer in women.

And there were two things that I will take away from all the activities, the engagement and the content I've seen: 

The first - that COVID is causing many women to miss their screening appointments - is a new, unexpected problem that no one could have foreseen this time last year. It’s meant that healthcare services have had to seriously look at how they provide screening and also has created a lot of momentum around new technologies. It’s an area where we think Mia, our breast screening AI, might be able to help. We were awarded some UK Government support to figure out how and we are working on that as quickly as possible. Breast Cancer Now estimated that almost one million women have missed appointments. That’s close to a thousand who might have undetected cancer and it’s only going to get worse. 

The second - that there’s a lot of momentum around the confidence that early detection leads to better outcomes. This is great as it’s well proven in the literature with the most recent paper by Professor Tabar published in May this year. It’s certainly something we believe at Kheiron. It underpins our mission and it’s why we are working on AI for breast screening. The more this message gets through, the more women are likely to attend screening and healthcare services are likely to provide it. It’s not easy to provide screening services and there were challenges before COVID came along - such as shortages of the highly trained breast radiologists who read the scans. What we are doing with Mia should help solve some of these challenges.

And the work doesn’t stop as Breast Cancer Awareness Month ends. We’re continuing our development of Mia with clinical trial results coming soon and new configurations of Mia to provide different solutions depending on what problems need solving. I’ll be sharing more in the coming months - we’re really excited about what we are doing and what comes next.