Vara is partnering with Quibim to bring proven mammography AI to Spanish screening programs.
Spain's breast cancer screening programs are facing real capacity and cost pressure. Our new partnership with Quibim is built to help them respond.
Vara, based in Berlin, and Quibim, headquartered in Valencia, are announcing a partnership to make Vara’s mammography AI available across Spanish breast cancer screening programs.
The pressure on Spanish screening
Across Europe, organized screening is working against three forces at once: a shrinking pool of breast radiologists, expanding eligibility criteria that pull more women into the program every year, and the rising financial weight of double reading on already-stretched budgets. Spain sits squarely inside that picture.
Programs cannot resolve any of this through hiring alone. The supply of specialists trained in mammography is not growing fast enough to match demand, and the cost curve of running double reading at scale keeps moving in one direction. AI-supported reading is one of the few options that touches capacity, recall rates, and cost in the same intervention, assuming the evidence behind it is solid.
Why Vara
Vara is purpose-built for mammography. We currently run in roughly half of Germany’s national breast cancer screening program, with around 200,000 cases per month and seven years of continuous clinical deployment behind us. That makes it the largest AI deployment inside any organized breast cancer screening program in the world.
Our PRAIM study, published in Nature Medicine, is the largest prospective evaluation of AI in screening conducted to date: 463,156 women, 12 centers, 119 radiologists, all under routine clinical conditions. The result was a 17.6% increase in cancer detection alongside a reduction in unnecessary recalls, with radiologist workload falling by up to 59% across the cohort. No other landmark trial in mammography AI has shown higher detection and lower recall rates in the same study population.
The infrastructure underneath those numbers matters as much as the numbers themselves. Every program we work with gets clean integration with existing PACS and reporting environments, plus continuous real-time monitoring of how the AI is actually performing in production. In screening, that kind of ongoing oversight is what separates a credible deployment from a press release.
Why Quibim
Quibim has spent more than a decade building clinical-grade AI for radiology. The team has deep roots across Spanish hospital systems and academic radiology, and a consistent record of choosing evidence over speculative claims, which is the only foundation a screening partnership can credibly start from.
For Spanish programs adopting Vara, Quibim provides direct presence on the ground, fluency in the Spanish regulatory and procurement environment, and an existing network of radiology leaders who will be among the first to evaluate AI inside their screening workflows.
A particular thank you to Ángel Alberich-Bayarri and the wider Quibim team for the partnership and the work ahead.
Why this matters
Spanish screening programs do not have the luxury of a multi-year evaluation cycle. The radiologist supply is what it is; eligibility keeps expanding; the budget pressure on double reading is already on the table. The practical question for program leaders is which AI has enough real-world evidence and operational maturity to be trusted inside an organized screening pathway, and which partner can actually get it deployed across Spanish institutions.
Vara and Quibim bring both halves of that answer: the largest body of prospective evidence in mammography AI, paired with a Spanish partner whose reputation in clinical radiology is already established. The aim is concrete, more effective and more sustainable screening, for the radiologists running these programs and for every woman who walks into a screening unit in Spain.