This month, Thirona celebrates the 10-year anniversary, so while the world is bustling with new applications for AI, we recognize a decade of working towards impact in treatment of lung diseases.

When I think back to when I first started Thirona, I wanted to take the latest research and translate it to medical applications that can help treat patients. I was a research scientist, taking a jump into a completely unknown world of entrepreneurship. I was taking a deep dive from the ‘business of writing scientific papers’ into a ‘business of selling innovative solutions’, determined to make science reach the clinics faster for the benefit of all people.

Thirona was born with the idea to bridge that gap and bring science to the clinics faster.

Did I have an idea what it takes to build a company? Not really.
Did I think I might fail? I didn’t bother.
Did things go how I expected? Not at all.
Do I regret it? Never, I’m happy I did it.

It was a journey of learning from mistakes, and at the same time a much richer journey than I could have imagined. For the first time, I experienced the thrill of working on real solutions, felt what ‘bridging the gap’ between science and practice really means – the difference between theory and real life impact.

The fact is that most research is never used. With over 5 million scientific papers published every year worldwide, there is more theoretical knowledge than we will ever be able to make useful. Through Thirona, I started realizing that we can make it happen – we can (actually) make science have an impact on peoples’ lives.

So, when onboarding our first customer, we didn’t hesitate to accept the challenge of running analysis for the world’s largest COPD research with 20,000 CT scans. That project turned out to be a very defining moment for the success of Thirona, the ‘make it or break it’ period. The gap we needed to bridge was much bigger than we could have imagined. There is obviously a very good reason why the phase between research and successful innovation is being called the ‘valley of death.’

We could have given up and admitted the software wasn’t mature enough yet. But we didn’t. We had enough expertise to deal with it, and we hired additional analysts to secure the quality output. As we moved forward, we were taking giant steps towards gaining in-depth expertise in lung image analysis, and towards robust reliability of our software. It was not only the ‘moment of truth’ for us, but also the very beginning of our robust quality loop process for development of new algorithms– our strongest asset today.

Fast forward a decade, and the basis of Thirona’s DNA remains the same, but our technology has advanced, our passion is even stronger, and we have proven we can do this. And now, when we develop something fascinating, obviously we are proud to see it published in a paper, but what is even more exciting – we want to bring it to patients as soon as we can.

Today, we are proud to partner with leading MedTech companies, providing them with advanced insights; insights which enable them to develop breakthrough innovations for precision medicine in interventional pulmonology. Our analysis also contributes to the development of novel pharmaceutical drugs, for both common and rare, life threating diseases with complex conditions. As most of our pivotal analyses are conducted automatically nowadays, the specialized analyst team drives these co-innovation trajectories.

What AI-based imaging brings is not only the fact that we can now ‘look’ inside the lungs, but also a realization that not all lungs are the same, as we were taught by anatomy books.
With artificial intelligence on board, the times of treating every disease with the same drug are gone forever. It’s not only about the disease anymore, but about the patient. The big shift that is taking place now (strongly driven by technology) is a shift from traditional treatment methods to a more personalized treatment approach.

Translating every relevant piece of science into a useful application that benefits patients is the fundamental reason for Thirona’s existence. Our software is informed by a library of millions of scans with all possible variations of diseases in all stadia, analyzed, checked, and double checked by human specialists, developed with doctors, compiling years of clinical research on real patients.

It’s like having a diagnosis or an intervention plan confirmed by not one, not two, but multiple doctors. It’s like having a compilation of the best medical knowledge available in the world, helping people wherever they are, whether it is a small clinic around the corner, or the best academic hospital specialized in pulmonology.

We are witnessing a major paradigm shift taking place in healthcare. It is not a futuristic idea, not a high-tech aspiration. It is already happening. Thirona’s technology is already used by pulmonologists and lung surgeons in more than 500 hospitals worldwide to personalize patients’ treatment and to inform lung interventions.

We are used to thinking about AI as an efficiency enabler, as an algorithm that can process more data faster, and we keep discussing whether it will, or will not, put many jobs at risk. But the true power of AI, especially in medicine, lies in enabling a whole new world of possibilities, enabling clinicians to see more than a human eye typically can see, and to detect very tiny abnormalities faster, with much more precision. This is how we believe AI should contribute to society, and this is how AI can actually make precision medicine and personalized treatment possible.

Lungs are impossible for humans to look inside without imaging technology, you can’t take out lungs to see what’s going on in there. Leveraging AI, we can take this next step, providing a more complete picture of the lungs. Our latest LungQ 3.0.0 software, which just received FDA 510(k) clearance, takes this even further by enabling broader adoption of AI for minimally invasive interventions for lung diseases such as COPD and lung cancer, helping save more healthy lung tissue and lung function capacity.

Combining the capabilities of medical imaging and pulmonology has the power to revolutionize the way we treat patients. With AI, we not only can identify the first small signs of disease symptoms faster than a human eye and quantify it more accurately, but we can also see things the human eye can’t see. Doctors can be doctors and focus on the best possible treatment they can provide, while AI supports this deeper visibility into anatomy.

And while we are strongly rooted in science, we can’t deny the essential roles collaboration across the industry and our own team have played in our success. Collaboration has always been at the heart of Thirona’s way of working and helped us to become the company we are today.

To my team – the people who have been with us from the very beginning and others that joined us along the journey with an enormous passion and enthusiasm. It has been a thrilling and fun experience together and my great privilege to lead such impactful changes with such a great team and partners. I am even more excited about the years to come, as we enter the next phase of transformation in the field. Only if we work together, can we shorten the whole innovation cycle and really help speed up scientific progress in healthcare.