Ascendant Dx Chosen For InnovateHER Finals

Ascendant Dx is one of 10 companies nationwide to be chosen as 2016 finalists in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s InnovateHER: Innovating for Women Business Challenge.

The Springdale-based company was recognized for its breast cancer diagnostic tool, which detects early-stage breast cancer by looking for marker proteins in patients’ tears. 

InnovateHER was founded by the SBA in 2015 as a platform to highlight innovative products and services that improve the lives of women and have a high potential for commercialization, according to the SBA website.

Chosen from 180 national semifinalists, the top 10 companies will present their products and ideas to a panel of judges March 17 in Washington, D.C.

Chief scientist Anna Daily will represent the Ascendant Dx in the competition.

The top three companies will receive $70,000 total in prize money, donated by Microsoft, according to an SBA press release announcing the InnovateHER finalists.

Ascendant Dx CEO Omid Moghadam says the diagnostic tool is more accurate that traditional testing.

Ongoing in-house research, which has followed 300 patients in five states since mid-2015, shows almost 90 percent sensitivity, meaning the test correctly identifies positive diagnoses almost 90 percent of the time, and more than 80 percent specifity, meaning negative results were accurate more than 80 percent of the time, he said.

According to the National Cancer Institute, about 50 percent of breast cancer diagnoses from mammograms are false positives and between 6 percent and 46 percent of women with invasive cancer will have negative mammograms.

Ascendant Dx is trying to raise $5 million to fund a large-scale clinical trial and the regulatory compliance process, the next steps toward commercialization, Moghadam said.