Renowned Silicon Valley venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, sat down with Tucker Carlson today to talk about several topics, including AI’s potential impact on healthcare.
Starting at the 1:06:40 interview mark, Mr. Carlson asked Mr. Palihapitiya to name three or four innovations that he is “pretty certain we are going to see life enhancers from AI.”
Mr. Palihapitiya responded by highlighting wide field OCT technology from Perimeter Medical Imaging AI (TSXV:PINK), a company in which he and his investor arm (Social Capital) owns an approximate 31% stake.
“So, I start companies. But, when I don’t see something that I think I can start right away and there’s somebody that’s a little ahead, I’ll just invest and I’ll take a large piece so that I can help guide them,” said Mr. Palihapitiya.
“One of those has been working on breast cancer surgery,” he said, referring to Perimeter.
“Today across America, for every 10 women that go and get diagnosed with breast cancer, three of the surgeries leave cancer behind,” he explained.
While performing a lumpectomy, a surgeon has to visualize with their own eyes, whether they think most of the cancer is gone, they close up the woman, and they take that sample, they give it to a pathologist, “and typically between seven and 11 days, which is how long it takes, because they are clogged up and there’s backlog, they’ll look under a microscope and visually inspect and say, actually, sorry, 30% of the time they say you left some cancer behind,” he added.
“So [Perimeter] basically says, “Hold on a second. I’ll just use AI. I’ll look right down to the granular microscopic level. I’ll take an extremely high res picture. My brain will be trained on only this one task, is there cancer? Is there no cancer?””
In November 2024, Perimeter reported positive topline results from a pivotal study designed to support the company’s planned FDA premarket approval (PMA) submission to market its next-generation B-Series with ImgAssist AI 2.0 for use during breast-conserving surgeries. The pivotal trial met its primary endpoint, achieving a statistically significant (p-value = 0.0050) reduction in patients with residual cancer during surgery. These results demonstrated super-superiority (lower bound of confidence interval for treatment effect greater than a predetermined minimal clinically meaningful difference) of the Perimeter B-Series OCT with ImgAssist AI 2.0 system’s ability to aid surgeons in achieving clear surgical margins during surgery, potentially lowering the need for reoperation.
“We are looking forward to submitting our FDA PMA for B-Series OCT with ImgAssist AI 2.0 in early 2025,” the company said in a statement when releasing the topline results.
