Hungarian tech company Oncompass Medicine won Digitaleurope’s Future Unicorn Award on Thursday, becoming Europe’s most promising tech firm. The company is developing software which can determine the exact treatments necessary for every type of cancer.
Out of the 35 thousand other contenders for the award, Oncompass is now expected to bring the most significant technological changes to Europe.
Oncompass is responsible for the Real-Time Oncology Treatment Calculator, which ranks the best possible treatments for a cancer patient within a total of 20 thousandths of a second.
The variables which the software takes into consideration are the 405 different cancer types, 52 thousand possible mutations, 26.838 medical-biological rules, and 1417 potentially applicable medicine types.
Dr. István Peták, the head of the company, has been researching how to eliminate cancer cells for 20 years. Alongside his best friend and colleague, Dr. Richárd Schwab, he created Oncompass Medicine to help determine exactly what treatment cancer patients need.
Their company has also been the recipient of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) award, the 2019 Informatics Innovation Prize of the Hungarian Association for Innovation, and they won the regional Get in the Ring! V4 start-up competition for the acceleration of drug development.
Peták said that he hopes his company’s success directs international attention to Hungarian organizations, so that other domestic tech companies can receive more investment and opportunities on an international level.
In the featured photo, István Peták, head of Oncompass Medicine, at the company’s Budapest research laboratory after winning the Digitaleurope competition. Featured photo via Tamás Kovács/MTI
