26 August 2025 – Oxford, UK, and Houston, TX -- Optellum, a global leader in AI for lung health, today announced the world’s first thorax CT foundation model built for precision lung care in real-world settings – an ambitious initiative aiming to revolutionize the early detection and management of lung diseases, with an initial focus on lung cancer.

Unlike traditional AI systems built to deliver a narrow range of task-specific outcomes, Optellum’s foundation model is trained on large-scale, diverse thorax CT datasets. This includes clinically validated datasets from the University of Oxford-led DART project research programme, which integrates the world’s largest lung cancer screening CT scan dataset with linked clinical and molecular data. Optellum’s unparalleled access to data has contributed to the robust development of the foundation model, which enables multiple clinical tasks – from early diagnosis and risk stratification to longitudinal monitoring and clinical trial acceleration.

The urgent need for change

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States and worldwide, claiming more lives each year than breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers combined. According to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), more than 2.5 million people worldwide will be diagnosed in 2025, and over 1.9 million will die from the disease.

While screening programs save lives, they do not reach everyone who develops lung cancer. Many cancer patients never meet screening criteria, and new trends in lung cancer, such as increasing incidence in non-smokers, never smokers, and in younger adults, are not yet reflected. Additionally, uptake and adherence to screening protocols remains low (18-20%, in the US). As a result, too many diagnoses still occur at late stages, when survival rates are drastically reduced. For those who receive a late-stage diagnosis of lung cancer, the five-year survival rate is only 9%, in comparison to when the disease is detected early, and the five-year increases to 64%.

Optellum is focusing on thorax CTs because they capture a complex anatomical area via an essential imaging modality available at hospitals worldwide. Thorax CTs enable detection and diagnosis of many lung diseases including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), interstitial lung disease, and pulmonary fibrosis, and a multi-disease AI model will accelerate clinical care.

A unique position to deliver

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