People and Perspectives
Dr Rakesh Neve
Chief Cancer Consultant
It is a well established fact that visual screening of the oral cavity helps in reduction of oral cancer mortality. Sadly, Despite the high risk of oral cancer in the Indian subcontinent, no national or regional screening programs exist. Doing such screening requires comprehensive knowledge of oral anatomy, clinical experience & expertise. Obviously this is not a scalable approach in a nation where 270 Million people consume risky forms of smoked or smokeless tobacco, and nearly 150 thousand people die of oral cancer every year. But that’s where we hope modern smartphone technology and artificial intelligence can come to the rescue.
Dr Ritwik Kulkarni
Chief Technology Officer
We set up OraiBio to solve the problem of late presentation of oral cancers. Screening for precancerous lesions and oral cancers with our tool has the potential to save more than hundred thousand lives annually in India alone, and millions more due to opportunistic tobacco cessation intervention in patients presenting with tobacco induced pre-cancerous lesions. Once delivered as an app, our tool will empower patients and their healthcare advisors from around the world to identify early signs of cancer and act in a timely manner. We will do so with world-class technology and a strong multidisciplinary team of oral health experts, onco surgeons, clinical research scientists, AI experts and software developers. To train the artificial intelligence tool, we need Hundreds and thousands of well annotated images of a variety of oral lesions acquired ethically from diverse patient populations.
Dr Uma Datar
Senior Oral Cancer Expert
At OraiBio we followed good clinical practice principles to design & implement a robust clinical protocol for image acquisition. Till date, we have 10 clinical sites where the protocol has been approved by a local ethical committee and is being used for acquiring smartphone images of a diverse range of oral lesions. These sites are geographically diverse, in urban as well as rural parts of India. The principal investigators at these sites are cancer experts, thus giving us confidence in their initial diagnosis. At OraiBio we have a team of experts, who ensure that the lesions reported from clinical sites are annotated & labelled properly. The sites also send biopsy findings where relevant, to confirm diagnosis for annotation purposes. Once this quality check is done, annotated images are fed into the process for training the machine learning model.
Dr Malemnganbi Tongbram
Molecular Biologist
At OraiBio , our vision straddles the worlds of clinical medicine and molecular biology, empowered by digital tech, especially Artificial Intelligence. Taking clinical problems to the labs- wet as well as digital- for investigation, coming with up ground-breaking interventions in healthcare by harnessing biotechnology and bioinformatics, and delivering public health benefits: these strands of work are intricately intertwined to form OraiBio’s DNA. The North-east of India bears the brunt of oral cancers due to rampant tobacco and areca nut consumption, and could benefit from these innovations in cancer prevention and early diagnosis.
Dr Prashant Lele
Strategy Consultant
The advent of AI and it’s relentless march into every aspect of our life is a given. Healthcare presents an interesting frontier for its application due to issues around ethics, privacy and equity. It requires careful thought and governance measures to be put in place for meaningful impact.