Less than a year after it received its first press coverage, medical device company Densitas Inc. is positioning itself to have a market-ready product for testing within a year with a commercial launch planned for the first half of 2014.

Densitas is a seed-level company launched by Dalhousie Associate Professor Mohamed Abdolell to develop the Densitas automated breast density measurement system, which will generate real-time breast density measurements each time a woman receives a screening mammogram.

The system can help to determine the risk of breast cancer. Women with very dense breasts can be as much as six times more likely to contract breast cancer than those with fatty breasts. So, a timely, accurate reading of density can help women and their doctors determine risk levels and assess how regularly a woman should have follow-up screening mammograms or if she should be directed to diagnostic mammography.

The company will be one of six contestants in the BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort Atlantic on Thursday, at which a panel of experts will award $30,000 in in-kind services to a life sciences company.

Just this week, the State of California joined Virginia, Connecticut, Texas and New York in passing legislation that requires women who have had a mammogram to be informed of their breast density; this translates into 12 million screen-eligible women, one third of the total screen-eligible women in the U.S.

When he launched the company, Abdolell was working with Quark Engineering CEO Tim Burke, but has now assembled a new team of innovation veterans. Brian Lowe, a co-founder of the First Angel Network and former COO of Immunovaccine Technologies, and Nicole LeBlanc, the CFO of New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and a handful of startups, are now working with Abdolell.

The founder said the team is in the midst of validating the algorithms used in the Densitas software, which sits on a server used in a mammogram procedure and delivers density measurements. Data show that in a head-to-head comparison witha leading competing algorithm, the Densitas algorithm far outperforms the competition, said Abdolell. 

Once the validation is completed, he hopes the device will proceed to regulatory approval in the European Union and United States.  

Abdolell said he is searching for an experienced CEO and CTO, and while it is difficult to find experienced management talent in the imaging space, with the help of the Centre for Imaging Technology Commercialization in Toronto, he is confident that he will fill these roles within the next six months.

Densitas Inc. is looking to raise equity funding that the team hopes can be leveraged into a total financing of about $2 million.

The company has received two Early Stage Commercialization Fund payments from Innovacorp and was in the top five of Innovacorp’s I-3 competition in the Halifax region.