On May 13 and 14, Oviedo hosted the fourth edition of the International Symposium of the University Institute of Oncology of the Principality of Asturias (IUOPA) under the theme “Advances in Molecular Oncology”. The event, which brought together more than 150 researchers and clinicians from top-tier national and international institutions, included a poster competition in which more than 50 research teams presented their latest scientific contributions.
In this highly competitive context, the work presented by Carlos Viadero, a researcher at Amber Health Solutions and the Fundación Centro Médico de Asturias, and Alejandro García, from the Biomedical Research Institute of the Hospital Gregorio Marañón, with the participation of Samuel García, a researcher at Amber Health Solutions, won the first prize for the best poster of the congress, awarded by the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM) at the closing ceremony.
Image 1. Members of the SCANHEALTH project with the poster. Source: Own work.
The poster “Towards Accessible Population-Wide Multi-Cancer Screening: High-Efficacy Detection of Breast, Colorectal, and Lung Cancer using Serum ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy” presented the preliminary results of the SCANHEALTH project on a cohort of 500 individuals—100 healthy controls and patients diagnosed with breast, colorectal, and lung cancer at different clinical stages, with a special focus on early stages (I-II). Using 100 µL of serum, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy captures the molecular fingerprint of the sample without the need for invasive procedures or complex reagents.
The results were compelling: all three classifiers achieved a balanced accuracy exceeding 92%, with AUCs of 0.985 for breast, 0.943 for colorectal, and 1.000 for lung cancer. Furthermore, the learning curve analysis showed that the model reaches a stable AUC ROC above 0.95 with fewer than 125 training samples, demonstrating robust generalization without overfitting.
Image 2. Poster presented at the IV IUOPA Symposium. Source: Alejandro García, Carlos Viadero, and Samuel García.
However, the presence of SCANHEALTH at the congress went beyond the poster competition. Oncologist Víctor Moreno, principal investigator of the Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention group at IDIBELL (Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute) and one of the project’s lead scientists, participated as a guest speaker in the plenary session dedicated to advances in cancer diagnosis, one of the symposium’s five major thematic areas.
Víctor Moreno’s participation as a speaker at a symposium of this caliber—where researchers from the CNIO, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, the Institute of Cancer Research in London, and the IRCCS in Milan also took part—underscores the scientific weight of the experts surrounding the SCANHEALTH project and reinforces its credibility within the Spanish and international oncology community.
For Amber Health Solutions, this double recognition at the IV IUOPA Symposium—the first prize for the poster and the presence of its collaborators in the main scientific program—represents a significant milestone in its clinical validation and institutional visibility strategy, at a time when the project is in the midst of its sample collection and diagnostic model training phase.
Image gallery:
Image 3. Carlos Viadero with the poster. Source: Own work.
Image 4. Alejandro García with the poster. Source: Own work.
Image 5. Samuel García with the poster. Source: Own work.
Image 6. Awarding of the best poster prize. Source: Own work.
The SCANHEALTH project is funded by:
Image 7. Logos of the entities funding the SCANHEALTH project. Source: AEI.
