MUSTOMO, INC - The Future of Breast Cancer Screening.
What do you get when you cross a geophysicist with an oncologist? A new method of using sound waves to screen for breast cancer, of course! It's no joke actually and LabStart has opted to take another LANL technology forward through the start up Mustomo, Inc.
Based on decades of research to identify what is underground, Dr. Lianjie Huang focused his knowledge to use the same technology to collect data and build images of breast tissue. By these extraordinary methods, the technology is able to quantify details of very small structures in breast tissue, enabling one to not only see that something is there, but to determine what is it. This kind of detail makes clear the difference between a benign and pathologic that needs to be removed.
While mammography is the best available screening tool so far, it is not able to distinguish characteristics of small structures and results in a large number of biopsies that show a false positive was detected. Women under 40 have more dense breasts for which mammography is especially limited in its ability to detect cancer. In addition, mammography is conducted with ionizing radiation, which is itself has a potential risk for cancer.
The high-resolution ultrasound imaging technology is non-ionizing, more comfortable and more effective even for dense breast tissue. LabStart has started Mustomo, Inc. to bring this amazing technology into market by working closely with Dr. Huang and LANL. We are builing the first prototype for human studies in conjunction with UNM Cancer Center. Look for more details of Mustomo Inc development in coming weeks and months.