Lunit aims to develop autonomous AI to detect cancer

Lunit's CEO Suh Beom-seok speaks at a press event to celebrate the company's 10-year anniversary in southern Seoul on Thursday. [LUNIT]

Lunit, a medical software company with a focus on AI-assisted cancer detection, announced a plan to develop autonomous artificial intelligence designed to detect all types of cancer without human intervention.

The Seoul-based company, listed on Kosdaq, is well known as the sole Korean company participating in the Joe Biden administration's cancer fight initiative, Cancer Moonshot.

Lunit CEO Suh Beok-seok believes that its autonomous AI and related big data system will be a game changer in cancer diagnosis and treatment — he believes that a time will come when AI could autonomously analyze patient data to detect hard-to-discover abnormalities that human doctors often miss.

“Lunit ultimately aims to hit an operating profit of 5 trillion won [$3.79 billion] and revenue of 10 trillion won by 2033,” Suh said at a press event celebrating Lunit’s 10th anniversary in southern Seoul on Thursday. “It’s difficult to reveal our specific goals and proportion of revenue we aim to reach for each business sector at this point [but] we predict that we will turn to operating profit by 2025.”

Lunit has two flagship products, Lunit Insight and Lunit Scope, that are currently commercialized across 2,000 medical facilities worldwide. Lunit Insight is an AI software that screens X-rays to detect breast and lung cancer. Lunit Scope is an AI-powered biomarker platform analyzing the density and location of cancer immune cells from a patient’s tissue slides to ultimately predict the treatment effect of anticancer drugs. However, these AI-powered products' capabilities extend to assisting human doctors' analyses — which Lunit aims to exceed.

Lunit's AI foundation model to detect human abnormalities is even more accurate than Google's, according to Lunit. Lunit scored an average of 0.904, while Google scored 0.824 on the AI algorithm, with 1 being the absolute standard of correctness.

"A total of 1,000 trillion won is spent annually worldwide to treat cancer," Seo said. "Lunit is still at the tip of the iceberg of the cancer market. Until now, the company was an AI solution company, but we strive to become an AI platform company as well as save more cancer patients through AI, upping their survival rate and reducing costs, moving forward."

The company has a two-pronged strategy to reach this goal: create an autonomous AI trained on a global database that can detect and diagnose all cancers as well as an AI-powered medical data platform that stores all databases from clinics worldwide that can be utilized and implemented in all institutions.

Lunit’s revenue jumped 200 percent on year to 16.4 billion won from January-June period. Operating loss was 12 billion won during the same period, lower than 2022’s 27.1 billion won. Eighty-five-point-eight percent of the revenue is generated overseas, with the company expanding its distribution channels through global partnerships with FujiFilm, Hologic, GE HealthCare, Sectra AB, Philips, AGFA HealthCare, IBM and Guardant Health.

“We are considering other global partnerships and M&As to reach that goal,” Suh said.

Lunit revealed at a public disclosure on Wednesday that it decided to issue approximately 1.86 million new shares at the share price of 108,700 won to raise capital of 201.8 billion won. After new shares are distributed on Sept. 25, existing shareholders will each receive an additional 0.15 shares per share. The company even revealed how the money will be used — 50.7 billion won in research and development, 40 billion won to enter new businesses, 90.7 billion won to fund other subsidiaries, and 20.4 billion won to recruit workers overseas.

“There are actual propositions we are considering in acquiring other companies to achieve our ultimate goal, but we cannot say anything further for now,” Suh said. “What I can tell you is that [the company] we are considering acquiring is not Korea-based and it is to create our AI database platform.”

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]