Dr István Peták: ‘The pieces of the puzzle are laid out on the table’

By: Gyarmati Orsolya Date: 2021. 05. 22. 19:00

His team’s personalised cancer therapy medical technology device finished first in a world contest called Get in the Ring, where 25,000 start-ups were competing. Dr István Peták, physician and molecular pharmacologist, the scientific director of Oncompass Medicine talked to Szilvia Krizsó, the host of Trade magazin’s Future Talks podcast about how they reached this level in the battle against cancer, and about how artificial intelligence (AI) technology can be used in cancer treatment today, when every minute 20 people dies of cancer on the planet.

What Oncompass Medicine developed is a software product that uses AI technology. Dr Peták believes that using AI and information technology in therapy planning is a milestone in the development of medicine. The company’s decision-supporting device collects, analyses and arranges pieces of information in a way that doctors can use them more quickly and easily. In one patient typically 4-5 gene errors are responsible for the development of cancer from the 600 genes that can have 6 million different mutations. This is a big number, but we can say that the pieces of the puzzle are laid out on the table, as the full genetic map of several thousand cancer types have already been prepared.