Oncomark

Onkomark Software Presentation on an IMac

Project Details

Background

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer affecting women, with over 2 million new cases worldwide in 2018 alone. Advances in treatment mean that survival rates amongst patients has improved more than 40% during the past 30 years. Innovations supporting these improvements include increased accuracy in panels of cancer biomarkers. The result is that today’s breast cancer patients receive better prognoses and more personalised patient care, including more accurate targeting of treatment.

Challenge

OncoMark, a diagnostics company, developed a prognostic assay for early stage breast cancer to determine the risk of recurrence and thus identify patients who did not need to undergo chemotherapy. Oncomark’s prognostic tool comprised a kit to analyse blood samples, a quality control process, and an algorithm to determine the high/low risk of disease recurrence. It had implemented an algorithm in R and had done some comparative testing of the algorithm in Excel.

Oncomark needed a secure online solution that clinicians could use to import the relevant patient data. Furthermore, software would apply laboratory QC rules to the data generated by its PCR machines, apply the risk-determination algorithm, and generate a report exportable to data in multiple CSV formats. have that data processed and display the results in a meaningful way. The project involved working alongside Bluebridge, a company specializing in SaMD hardware.

Outcome

Greenfinch developed a data analysis module to handle both the importation and analysis of data, an application to test the analysed data from the module against known, and expected results, and a wrapper console to drive both the module and the testing application. Finally, Greenfinch developed a web interface to the data analysis module to allow technicians, oncologists and pathologists to run and access reports on patient data.