hi there everyone it’s a great honor to
be here today
my name is Billy Boyle I’m co-founder
vowel stone me and my team have
developed a breathalyzer for disease and
as our company mission to try and save a
hundred thousand lives and one and a
half billion dollars in health care
costs so we see two big problems in
health care today the first is too many
people are diagnosed with disease when
it’s too late to cure and too many
people are medications that don’t work
for them there’s no better example than
a cancer we know if you detect early
survival chances are ten times better
and treatment costs are ten times lower
so here’s one of the most shocking
statistics I think I’ve ever seen one in
two of us are gonna get cancer one and
two of us in this room wanted to have
everyone you know from parents partners
children grandchildren one and so you’re
gonna get cancer and then the war in
cancer the battlefield isn’t even
survival chances are good for some
cancers we’re screening as effective or
treatments are effective we have a big
problem in cancers like lung and
colorectal cancer which affect millions
of people but survival chances are
really bad despite forty years of trying
to develop new drugs the crazy thing is
we already know what to do detect early
when treatments that exist today work
and cure for the long term so we know in
colorectal cancer if you pick it up at
Stage one survival chances are about 95%
Stage four that drops there about 5% and
you’ve got to be pretty lucky to be in
that 5% early detection is our greatest
opportunity so in 2012 four hundred and
fifteen thousand people were diagnosed
with colorectal cancer one of them was
my wife kit this is us on our wedding
day with my kids
Cate was rushed in the hospital a couple
of months before that with what turned
out to be a stage four colon cancer and
she wasn’t in the lucky five percent she
died two years later on Christmas
morning 2014 and every day I wake up
angry angry she was diagnosed late my
children don’t have a mother
but most of all I agree that our story’s
not unique
there’s millions with a story just like
this and lots of people in this room
with the story just like this we need to
do better we need to pick up cancers
earlier when they’re treatable and
anglers and energy it’s what drives me
and my team on our mission to try and
detect cancer sooner so fewer families
and future will have a story just like
that and while the problem and the
solution is easy to state we save lives
by picking up cancer sooner make another
reality is incredibly difficult
so in colorectal cancer we have
screening programs today but too many
people go on and diagnose
too late stage cancer so what’s
happening what’s the problem so current
screening methods in colorectal cancer
or either fecal based test or
colonoscopy or some combination of both
and it varies in the country that you’re
in the reality is patients don’t like it
compliance rates are low they don’t show
up for the test across Europe is about
50% compliance rate on average so what
this means if you take a hundred people
that have colorectal cancer half don’t
show up and they were going to develop
late stage disease and the second issue
is the fecal test aren’t that good so
the sensitivity is quite low it’s not
that good of picking up the cancer when
it’s present so these two factors
combined that lead to too many people
being diagnosed lit and actually in a
lot of cancers we have no tests
whatsoever so we need to have next
generations of tests which are
acceptable to patients which are
sensitive to early stage cancer is able
to pick them up that have very low rates
of false positives and false alarms and
a cost effective for healthcare
providers and that’s what we’re trying
to develop with our breath biopsy
technology so I’m sure some of you will
have seen you know headlines about
cancer sniffing dogs and you wonder you
know what’s going on there so every time
you breathe out there’s thousands of
chemicals on your breath called volatile
organic compounds or VOCs and some of
these views
biomarkers and everything from cancer to
infectious disease and inflammatory
disease and the kind of first question
you ask is what are they and where do
they come from so some of them are
endogenous metabolites and why this is
important is why your genome can tell
you about the risk of getting disease
it’s your downstream metabolism that
gives you the best real-time snapshot of
your actual disease state and this is
especially important in cancer we’ve
known for about 75 years the cancer has
an ultimate ableism even at early stage
so that’s why things like pet scans work
for instance so the second question is
where do these compounds come from so
some are produced locally in there are
ways but actually quite a lot of them
originate from your blood which makes
sense your lungs are very good at
exchanging gas from blood to their ways
and what we can actually do is every
time you breathe out we can trap store
pre concentrate and enrich these
biomarkers and here’s the cool thing
once every minute all the blood in your
body circulates wants and passes through
your lungs so by sampling over that type
of time period you have a window into
essentially your entire blood volume and
it’s for those reasons that we think
this is a really really interesting
technique when you’re trying to pick up
disease at an early stage so one of the
core technologies that we’ve developed
is a microchip chemical sensor and what
makes it special is you can program what
you want the sniff light just by
changing the software so it’s a bit like
an electronic nose and me and two
friends researchers at Cambridge
University we developed this and spun a
business out back in 2004 an original
focus was to build products in security
and industrial applications and
everything from sniffing toxic gasses to
contamination and crude oil but because
you have this ability to reprogram what
you want the sniff just by changing the
softwar we’ve always wanted to adapt it
for these medical applications so I said
earlier patient acceptability is a key
factor here so I’ll ask you a question
would you rather have a colonoscopy or a
breath test and you know it’s a pretty
easy answer breath is the ultimate
non-invasive test it’s the only anytime
anyplace sample matrix and what this
means is that we can take breadth biopsy
to the patient so we can collect samples
not just in the hospital setting but we
can collect samples in the GP setting
pharmacies supermarkets even the home
and the other thing is cancer isn’t just
a problem in Europe in the US this is a
global problem our goal is to make
breast biopsy low-cost enough so we can
bring it to millions of people around
the world and hepatech help pick up
cancer center so over the years we’ve
worked with a lot of academics and
clinical researchers who’ve been taking
a platform and integrating it into
clinical studies they would collect
patient samples run those samples and
publish those findings so we have an our
website a moment about a hundred
published papers and scientific posters
and in one of these studies a pilot
studying colorectal cancer they were
able to find it
they could improve compliance rates and
they could improve the rates of early
detection which is tremendously exciting
for us so what we’re doing now is
building on that and running large scale
clinical trials so with the support of
the NHS Cancer Research UK and run the
studies here in Cambridge and this is in
lung and colorectal cancer but multiple
tumor types as well and we aim to
recruit about 6,000 patients in total
which makes it the biggest breadth based
trial ever undertaken so high wells are
going to work that’s what the clinical
trial is going to tell us but what we
know is we have to try
someone has to solve the problem so he
wrote a book called late fragments it’s
actually a book about life and living
and in it she uses one of my favorite
quotes made use of timer as present to
you and I think that applies to all of
us the work we do the relationships we
have you have to make them count thank
you [Applause]
be here today
my name is Billy Boyle I’m co-founder
vowel stone me and my team have
developed a breathalyzer for disease and
as our company mission to try and save a
hundred thousand lives and one and a
half billion dollars in health care
costs so we see two big problems in
health care today the first is too many
people are diagnosed with disease when
it’s too late to cure and too many
people are medications that don’t work
for them there’s no better example than
a cancer we know if you detect early
survival chances are ten times better
and treatment costs are ten times lower
so here’s one of the most shocking
statistics I think I’ve ever seen one in
two of us are gonna get cancer one and
two of us in this room wanted to have
everyone you know from parents partners
children grandchildren one and so you’re
gonna get cancer and then the war in
cancer the battlefield isn’t even
survival chances are good for some
cancers we’re screening as effective or
treatments are effective we have a big
problem in cancers like lung and
colorectal cancer which affect millions
of people but survival chances are
really bad despite forty years of trying
to develop new drugs the crazy thing is
we already know what to do detect early
when treatments that exist today work
and cure for the long term so we know in
colorectal cancer if you pick it up at
Stage one survival chances are about 95%
Stage four that drops there about 5% and
you’ve got to be pretty lucky to be in
that 5% early detection is our greatest
opportunity so in 2012 four hundred and
fifteen thousand people were diagnosed
with colorectal cancer one of them was
my wife kit this is us on our wedding
day with my kids
Cate was rushed in the hospital a couple
of months before that with what turned
out to be a stage four colon cancer and
she wasn’t in the lucky five percent she
died two years later on Christmas
morning 2014 and every day I wake up
angry angry she was diagnosed late my
children don’t have a mother
but most of all I agree that our story’s
not unique
there’s millions with a story just like
this and lots of people in this room
with the story just like this we need to
do better we need to pick up cancers
earlier when they’re treatable and
anglers and energy it’s what drives me
and my team on our mission to try and
detect cancer sooner so fewer families
and future will have a story just like
that and while the problem and the
solution is easy to state we save lives
by picking up cancer sooner make another
reality is incredibly difficult
so in colorectal cancer we have
screening programs today but too many
people go on and diagnose
too late stage cancer so what’s
happening what’s the problem so current
screening methods in colorectal cancer
or either fecal based test or
colonoscopy or some combination of both
and it varies in the country that you’re
in the reality is patients don’t like it
compliance rates are low they don’t show
up for the test across Europe is about
50% compliance rate on average so what
this means if you take a hundred people
that have colorectal cancer half don’t
show up and they were going to develop
late stage disease and the second issue
is the fecal test aren’t that good so
the sensitivity is quite low it’s not
that good of picking up the cancer when
it’s present so these two factors
combined that lead to too many people
being diagnosed lit and actually in a
lot of cancers we have no tests
whatsoever so we need to have next
generations of tests which are
acceptable to patients which are
sensitive to early stage cancer is able
to pick them up that have very low rates
of false positives and false alarms and
a cost effective for healthcare
providers and that’s what we’re trying
to develop with our breath biopsy
technology so I’m sure some of you will
have seen you know headlines about
cancer sniffing dogs and you wonder you
know what’s going on there so every time
you breathe out there’s thousands of
chemicals on your breath called volatile
organic compounds or VOCs and some of
these views
biomarkers and everything from cancer to
infectious disease and inflammatory
disease and the kind of first question
you ask is what are they and where do
they come from so some of them are
endogenous metabolites and why this is
important is why your genome can tell
you about the risk of getting disease
it’s your downstream metabolism that
gives you the best real-time snapshot of
your actual disease state and this is
especially important in cancer we’ve
known for about 75 years the cancer has
an ultimate ableism even at early stage
so that’s why things like pet scans work
for instance so the second question is
where do these compounds come from so
some are produced locally in there are
ways but actually quite a lot of them
originate from your blood which makes
sense your lungs are very good at
exchanging gas from blood to their ways
and what we can actually do is every
time you breathe out we can trap store
pre concentrate and enrich these
biomarkers and here’s the cool thing
once every minute all the blood in your
body circulates wants and passes through
your lungs so by sampling over that type
of time period you have a window into
essentially your entire blood volume and
it’s for those reasons that we think
this is a really really interesting
technique when you’re trying to pick up
disease at an early stage so one of the
core technologies that we’ve developed
is a microchip chemical sensor and what
makes it special is you can program what
you want the sniff light just by
changing the software so it’s a bit like
an electronic nose and me and two
friends researchers at Cambridge
University we developed this and spun a
business out back in 2004 an original
focus was to build products in security
and industrial applications and
everything from sniffing toxic gasses to
contamination and crude oil but because
you have this ability to reprogram what
you want the sniff just by changing the
softwar we’ve always wanted to adapt it
for these medical applications so I said
earlier patient acceptability is a key
factor here so I’ll ask you a question
would you rather have a colonoscopy or a
breath test and you know it’s a pretty
easy answer breath is the ultimate
non-invasive test it’s the only anytime
anyplace sample matrix and what this
means is that we can take breadth biopsy
to the patient so we can collect samples
not just in the hospital setting but we
can collect samples in the GP setting
pharmacies supermarkets even the home
and the other thing is cancer isn’t just
a problem in Europe in the US this is a
global problem our goal is to make
breast biopsy low-cost enough so we can
bring it to millions of people around
the world and hepatech help pick up
cancer center so over the years we’ve
worked with a lot of academics and
clinical researchers who’ve been taking
a platform and integrating it into
clinical studies they would collect
patient samples run those samples and
publish those findings so we have an our
website a moment about a hundred
published papers and scientific posters
and in one of these studies a pilot
studying colorectal cancer they were
able to find it
they could improve compliance rates and
they could improve the rates of early
detection which is tremendously exciting
for us so what we’re doing now is
building on that and running large scale
clinical trials so with the support of
the NHS Cancer Research UK and run the
studies here in Cambridge and this is in
lung and colorectal cancer but multiple
tumor types as well and we aim to
recruit about 6,000 patients in total
which makes it the biggest breadth based
trial ever undertaken so high wells are
going to work that’s what the clinical
trial is going to tell us but what we
know is we have to try
someone has to solve the problem so he
wrote a book called late fragments it’s
actually a book about life and living
and in it she uses one of my favorite
quotes made use of timer as present to
you and I think that applies to all of
us the work we do the relationships we
have you have to make them count thank
you [Applause]
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