Pittsburgh-based SmartBreast Corp., a privately held company focused on breast cancer screening and diagnosis, announces that it has acquired the Discovery NM750b Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI) assets from GE Healthcare, including the MBI scanner designs, manufacturing tools, instructions, related patents, and the installed-base service business. SmartBreast will manufacture, market, and distribute the MBI scanner, rebranded as “Eve Clear Scan e750.”
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 study with one-year follow up of 1,585 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.
“GE Healthcare’s MBI system has developed a positive reputation for helping physicians with the detection of cancer lesions in dense breast tissue,” says Erez Levy, general manager of nuclear medicine at GE Healthcare. “We are proud of this system’s legacy and will continue to support its mission with our world-class cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) detectors for SmartBreast’s use in the MBI system.”
SmartBreast CEO James Hugg adds: “We will become the largest global player in secondary screening and diagnostics for women with dense breasts by providing the most effective tool for locating and diagnosing cancers occult on mammography. We have acquired Dilon’s and also GE Healthcare’s MBI product lines, consolidating clinically proven reliable products with 217 installations globally. Our mission is to make MBI available to all dense breast patients woefully in need of better cancer discovery and diagnostic tools.”
