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MD Next | Q3 2022

Page 16

STARTUP PROFILES

power cables. These light and power cables have the potential to create OR staff trips and falls, sterile field contamination, and OR fires and patient burns. The ArthroFree wireless camera system eliminates all these potential pitfalls and yet is compatible with nearly all industry-standard lens, couplers, monitors, and patient data/information boxes.

2015. While at DragonID Mr. Malinskiy not only incubated the idea behind Lazurite, but he also earned a number of accolades including being named to Forbes 30 under 30. Before his time with DragonID, Mr. Malinskiy began his entrepreneurship journey when he founded and ran Dragon Intelinet Development, an information technology company that was acquired by a leading company in the SMB computing segment, from 2000 to 2008. Mr. Malinskiy holds a Master of Science degree in biomedical engineering from Cleveland State University.

to a reduced quality of life for patients. Many of the newest and most beneficial cancer drugs are also very expensive, a single dose can cost more than $20,000 USD. Unfortunately, many patients are exposed to toxic therapy with no improvement in survival and experience adverse side effects that require hospitalization. While cancer diagnostic tests from companies like Foundation Medicine, Guardant and others enable physicians to target treatment for specific types of cancer tumors and mutations, there is limited precision regarding which cancer patients will actually benefit from a targeted therapy versus those who will not. Cancer therapy monitoring identifies those patients who are not responding to cancer drug therapy. The

current standard of care uses radiologic imaging techniques to measure a cancer patient’s tumor growth or shrinkage at regular intervals, usually every 8 to 12 weeks. If the imaging results indicate the patient’s tumor is growing, the physician and patient know that the drug therapy is not working. Current tumor imaging techniques often lack precision, can be expensive, timeconsuming and expose the patient to radiation. Imaging usually requires weeks or months, after the initiation of therapy, for tumor response to be visible. If a tumor is not responding to therapy, patients wait those weeks or months on an ineffective therapeutic regime to switch to a new treatment that may provide better results. A quick assessment of therapeutic effectiveness would avoid continuing an ineffective therapy and enable the patient and physician to make earlier decisions about alternative treatment options Several diagnostics companies are working on real-time cancer therapy monitoring tests. Most work by measuring the cell-free DNA (cfDNA) fragments found circulating in the blood. The release of cfDNA into the bloodstream is driven by the primary tumor, tumor cells that circulate in peripheral blood, metastatic deposits and normal cell types. Tumor cells and cfDNA circulate in the bloodstream of all patients with cancer.

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Lazurite CEO—Eugene Malinskiy is one of three co-founders of Lazurite, launched in May 2015; the first product to market is

the ArthroFree wireless surgical camera system. To date, Mr. Malinskiy has brought Lazurite through three rounds of funding, raising more than $18 million. Previously, Mr. Malinskiy founded and served as CEO of DragonID, LLC, a healthcare innovation and engineering consultancy specializing in medical devices for the fields of cardiology and orthopaedics, from June 2012 to May

Cadex Genomics Most patients with metastatic cancer (a stage IV cancer diagnosis) ultimately die from their disease. For these late-stage cancer patients, the goal of treatment is to extend survival while maintaining or improving the quality of life for the patient. Physicians make difficult decisions balancing the perceived benefits of cancer drug therapy versus the toxicity and side effects impacting the quality of life for the patient. Cancer drugs are designed to attack, destroy, and shrink cancer cells and come with a spectrum of sideeffects which often are toxic and lead

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