After acquiring the Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI) assets from GE Healthcare and Dilon Technologies, Inc., SmartBreast Corporation (SmartBreast™), a privately held company focused on breast cancer screening and diagnosis, announced that it has formed a partnership with FoxSemicon Integrated Technologies, Inc. (FITI) to manufacture Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI) systems.
FITI has invested substantially in SmartBreast and will be the contract manufacturer for two MBI systems recently acquired by SmartBreast: the GE Healthcare Discovery NM 750b and the Dilon Technologies D6800. SmartBreast will rebrand the two systems as “EVE CLEAR SCAN™” e750 and e680, respectively. Together, SmartBreast and FITI will co-develop and manufacture innovative, cost-effective, next-generation MBI systems to further increase the efficacy of detecting cancer in the earlier stage. The companies plan to integrate stereotactic MBI-guided biopsy and 3D-MBI technology to further enhance functionality.
According to SmartBreast, MBI saves lives by detecting breast cancer earlier in women with dense breasts, who comprise about 40% of American, European and African women and 70% of Asian women. MBI sees through dense breast tissue and finds cancers that mammography misses. In a published clinical study1 with one-year follow up of 1585 women with dense breasts, researchers at the Mayo Clinic reported that mammography found 3.2 cancers per 1,000 women with dense breasts. Adding low-dose MBI increased the number of cancers found to 12 per 1,000.
“FITI is excited to partner with SmartBreast to help women around the world with the earlier detection of cancer in dense breast tissue,” says Kevin Chiu, CEO and President of FITI. “We are proud to invest in and work with SmartBreast to provide highly effective MBI systems for women around the world.”
According to Dr. James Hugg, SmartBreast CEO and President, “We are executing a strategy to grow SmartBreast to become the largest global player in the secondary screening and diagnostics market for women with dense breasts by providing the most effective tool for locating and diagnosing cancers occult on mammography. We acquired the Dilon Technologies D6800 and GE Healthcare’s Discovery NM 750b MBI product lines, consolidating clinically proven reliable products with 217 installations globally. SmartBreast, working with our manufacturing partner FITI, will make MBI available to all dense breast patients who are woefully in need of better cancer discovery and diagnostic tools.”
Contact Dr. Hugg (james.hugg@smartbreast.com) about MBI or investing in SmartBreast, which is beginning a $5M SEED Financing Round.
- DJ Rhodes, et al, American Journal of Roentgenology 2015, 204:241-251.
About SmartBreast Corporation:
SmartBreast Corp. is privately held with headquarters near Pittsburgh and offices in Los Angeles and Taipei, Taiwan (eveclearscan.com and smartbreast.com are under construction). It is a subsidiary of privately held EVO WorldWide, LLC (evo-worldwide.com) that distributes MBI globally. SmartBreast was founded in 2019 by Bradley Patt, PhD (Board Chair, Los Angeles), Prof. Chin-Tu Chen, PhD (Board Vice-Chair, Chicago), and James Hugg, PhD (CEO, Pittsburgh), each of whom has 30+ years’ experience in medical imaging. SmartBreast manufactures molecular breast imaging (MBI) scanners for dense breasts under the brand name EVE CLEAR SCAN™, which along with SmartBreast™, EVE SCAN™, and the EVE owl logo are trademarks of SmartBreast Corporation.
