Healthcare Transformation > C the Signs

C the Signs

Building digital solutions to find cancer up to 5 years sooner

By Kathleen Hull Photography by Lincoln Gore

A primary care physician in Britain’s National Health System, Bea Bakshi, M.D., was inspired to start C the Signs after encountering a patient in the emergency room late one night. The patient’s symptoms — which had been overlooked in earlier medical visits — turned out to be pancreatic cancer. Sadly, he died just three weeks later.

“Cancer is one of those diseases that is so time critical,” Dr. Bakshi says. She began to wonder how physicians could identify patients at risk of cancer earlier. Soon afterward, C the Signs was born.

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The company focuses on developing artificial intelligence models for different tumor types. These models analyze data in a patient’s medical record and patient-reported data, informing the patient or provider if there is evidence of cancer risk. The C the Signs algorithm then tracks the patient moving forward, monitoring if and when they do receive a cancer diagnosis. Known in the tech industry as a “closed-loop learning approach,” this method helps C the Signs refine their models.

The company’s time in the Accelerate program provided a further degree of refinement, with the C the Signs team digging into Mayo Clinic’s data to conduct retrospective testing. “We actually had the opportunity to see if we could intercept cancers earlier than the time and date of the diagnosis by physicians at Mayo,” Dr. Bakshi explains. Her team examined data related to the five types of cancer with the highest mortality rates in the U.S. — breast, colorectal, lung, prostate and pancreatic cancer — and found they were able to detect cancer up to five years earlier in 26% of patients. “That was phenomenal for us, and a really exciting research opportunity that we’re planning to publish,” Dr. Bakshi says.

After its stint in Accelerate, C the Signs was chosen to participate in the White House CancerX Accelerator, part of an initiative by the U.S. government to reduce cancer mortality by at least 50% over the next 25 years. Dr. Bakshi’s team is also preparing to launch a prospective study in partnership with Mayo Clinic.

“We’ve detected 50,000 patients with cancer in the UK. In five years’ time, I want to be talking about the number of patient lives we’ve saved in the United States,” Dr. Bakshi says. “That’s what good looks like for us.”