Crowdfunding success for cancer innovation

In its first day, an online crowdfunding campaign for an innovative cancer technology has raised $20,000 in donations.

WaveCheck — a painless, non-surgical clinical technique — is poised to transform chemotherapy response monitoring for women with breast cancer. 

Invented by Sunnybrook's Dr. Gregory Czarnota and Ryerson University's Michael C. Kolios, WaveCheck combines traditional ultrasound with new software to detect responses in chemotherapy in breast cancer tissues, making it possible for a woman to know what's happening inside her own body weeks, not months, into her chemotherapy treatment.

WaveCheck has been used in clinical studies at Sunnybrook with nearly 100 women receiving upfront, neoadjuvant chemotherapy to treat locally-advanced breast cancer. These results are published in two leading journals, Clinical Cancer Research and Translational Oncology.

To make WaveCheck available to women everywhere as fast as possible, MaRS Innovation seeks to raise $96,987 on Indiegogo from October 9 to November 27, 2013 and get the first of three North American clinical study locations running in parallel with Sunnybrook's existing data. The campaign's overall goal is to raise $687,950 to fund all three sites with WaveCheck's partners.

Watch the video below to learn more and visit the Indiegogo page to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign: