ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Avenda aims to bring personalization to prostate cancer treatment with technology that produces a 3D map showing the precise location of cancer within the prostate.
Founded in 2017 and spun out of UCLA, Avenda Health is using image fusion (fusing MRI scans and real-time ultrasound) and AI-based prediction and mapping technologies to produce a 3D map that precisely shows the location of cancer within the prostate, improving the accuracy of focal tumor ablation and enabling the procedure to be performed in the urologist’s office.
According to CEO Shyam Natarajan, PhD, Avenda’s technology has its roots in research conducted at UCLA in the early 2010s when Natarajan and Leonard Marks, MD (Avenda’s chief medical officer) were collaborating on targeted prostate biopsy. The two went on to co-found Avenda along with another UCLA colleague, now Avenda’s chief operating officer, Brittany Berry-Pusey, PhD.
The technology they developed at UCLA allows a urologist to use the patient’s MRI scan as a real-time overlay during an ultrasound-guided biopsy procedure to achieve a more targeted biopsy, explains Natarajan, who says it “has been used to biopsy some 5,000 to 6,000 patients to date and has received numerous multimillion-dollar research awards.”
