Crowdfunding for chemotherapy monitoring

WaveCheck — a painless, non-surgical clinical technique developed by Dr. Gregory Czarnota of the University of Toronto and Michael Kolios of Ryerson University and supported by MaRS Innovation — seeks to transform chemotherapy response monitoring for women with breast cancer.

Now, Czarnota and Kolios have launched an international crowdfunding campaign using Indiegogo to help make the technology available to all women with breast cancer as quickly as possible. By the end of the campaign's first week, they had already raised approximately $25,000 or 26 per cent of their goal.

“The hard truth for women with breast cancer is that 60 to 70 per cent of chemotherapy treatments fail,” says Czarnot, an associate professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology and an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at U of T. “The 1.5 million women worldwide who will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year need to know that their chemotherapy is working as soon as possible.

"But this kind of treatment monitoring doesn’t currently exist in standard clinical practice. Instead, a woman’s tumour response is evaluated after she completes her chemotherapy treatment, which is typically a four- to six-month process."

WaveCheck combines traditional ultrasound with new software to detect responses to chemotherapy in breast cancer tissues. By making better, more accurate information available about a woman’s response to her chemotherapy treatment in weeks rather than months, Czarnota says, WaveCheck creates greater transparency through dialogue between a women and her doctors, empowering her to participate in discussions about whether a given chemotherapy treatment is effective.

“We believe that fast access to WaveCheck’s analysis could give women and their medical teams crucial insight into whether they’ve chosen an effective treatment much sooner and, eventually, give insight into whether to change her treatment if her tumour’s not responding,” says Czarnota.

Czarnota, chief of Radiation Oncology at Sunnybrook’s Odette Cancer Centre, and Kolios, professor of Physics and Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Applications of Ultrasound at Ryerson, have used WaveCheck in clinical studies with nearly 100 women receiving upfront, neoadjuvant chemotherapy to treat locally-advanced breast cancer. The results are published in two leading journals, Clinical Cancer Research and Translational Oncology.

“WaveCheck is in the last development stage in its journey from the laboratory to the clinic, which is also where funding becomes hardest to find,” says Raphael Hofstein, president and chief executive officer of MaRS Innovation. “As WaveCheck’s commercialization agent, we provided $250,000 in seed funds along with business development and intellectual property protection to bring WaveCheck this far; it’s cleared the proof-of-principle and prototyping phases with flying colours. But successfully completing these parallel studies is crucial in proving WaveCheck’s data is replicable in any clinic, convincing other doctors to eventually adopt the technique, and accelerating the time it takes to bring it to clinics worldwide.”

Many funding agencies and foundations invested in the research underlying WaveCheck at much earlier stages, says Dr. Michael Julius, vice-president, research, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

“This investment underscores that transformative research must be supported at all stages along the innovation pipeline if we are to get it to those who need it.”

Supporting agencies include:

• Canada Foundation for Innovation
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research
• Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario
• Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
• The Terry Fox Foundation.

To make WaveCheck available to women everywhere as fast as possible, MaRS Innovation seeks to raise $96,987 on Indiegogo from October 9 to November 27, 2013 and get the first of three North American clinical study locations running in parallel with Sunnybrook’s existing data. The campaign’s overall goal is to raise $687,950 to fund all three sites with WaveCheck’s partners at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, London Health Sciences Centre in London, and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

“If these clinical studies replicate the early studies, we could use this technology to monitor tumor response early in treatment and to predict which patients will continue on in their therapy to have a complete pathological response,” said Dr. Wei Yang, professor of Diagnostic Imaging at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and clinician lead at the designated WaveCheck study site. “On the other hand, for patients in whom the test indicates a poor response to treatment, the regimen could be changed to a more efficacious one.”

In the Indiegogo campaign video, Czarnota, Kolios and three of the 100 women who participated in the first Sunnybrook study explain WaveCheck’s impact.

The campaign has attracted support from a wide range of donors. A dozen artists across Canada and internationally have supported WaveCheck’s Indiegogo campaign for a combined total of over $15,000:

• Nine members of the Toronto-based Women’s Art Association of Canada have donated 10 original pieces as perks for WaveCheck supporters to claim, including “Don’t Go Back to Sleep,” an original work commissioned in response to WaveCheck’s images and signed by the inventors.
• Sonnet L’Abbé, Canadian poet and University of British Columbia lecturer, wrote and designed “the moment came when I knew my body,” a visual poem inspired by WaveCheck’s technology and available through the campaign perks as a poster.
• Other donations include a lap quilt from St. John’s, Newfoundland and a painting by Victoria, BC artist Ashlee Trcka, making the artistic contributions truly Canada-wide.

(Read more about the Indiegogo campaign.)