By Tushar Pandey, Joseph Peterson and John Cole
Most of us have experienced the pain of a friend or family member’s cancer diagnosis and treatment in our lives. The process of diagnosis, treatment and monitoring — and the resulting uncertainty — has a debilitating impact.
At SimBioSys, we are blessed to be able to go into work to address this problem – both incredibly personal and could have such a significant impact on humanity.
With the close of our Series A round, we have reached a significant milestone in our journey. A signal to the market that SimBioSys is onto something really special and a responsibility to ensure our work has an impact of millions of patients in the future.
We founded SimBioSys on three principles:
- Precision medicine remains imprecise
- Precision medicine needs to be made available to all
- Simulation techniques can and will evolve healthcare
As an organization, we’ve always rallied around the Google Maps analogy — the desire to eliminate uncertainty in any journey we take, and the need to know everything from our ETA to traffic conditions before we travel. We believe Cancer is the most significant journey for any patient, their family, and their cancer care team.
Before navigation systems like Google Maps become part and parcel of our lives, extensive foundational work needed to be done. Today, the field of precision medicine finds itself in a similar state — foundations have been laid with decades of research and innovation in focused areas continues. The missing piece is to bring it all together and make it available to all.
Our work at SimBioSys represents a convergence of foundational technologies and research developed and performed by many brilliant minds ranging from imaging to genomics, to drug development. Our homage to them is to ensure their work makes the finish line — where cancer care is no longer a trial-and-error approach, and precision cancer care is available to all.
Working towards understanding cancer comprehensively with a bottom-up approach — what drives it?, what makes it variable from patient to patient?, how it evolves? and how it responds to therapy? — while ambitious and not en vogue – is scientifically sound and is desperately needed to complement the ongoing efforts. The mechanisms we model, such as drug delivery, metabolism, and spatial heterogeneity have been known for decades, but have yet to be incorporated into clinical decision making. We are uniquely positioned to make this a reality through TumorScope®. A platform that brings together data for a patient at multiple scales, to capture the manifestation of tumor biology is what is needed to empower clinicians to treat a patient as an individual.
We believe that for precision medicine to deliver on its promise and for us to deliver on ours, our guiding principles and approach must be inclusive. Leveling the playing field for doctors in rural areas and third world countries where state-of-the-art testing approaches may not be available is paramount. To not just focus on treating cancer in advanced stages but in early stages where cure will lead to better outcomes. To focus on the patient experience just as much as clinical decision making.
Collectively, we are incredibly proud and humbled to be working alongside a stellar and diverse team, innovating at an unprecedented pace with people who don’t consider this just a job – who consider it personal. Blessed to have amazing collaborators across the country who believe in the technology and can’t wait to use TumorScope for their patients. And now, an exceptional group of investors who have unwavering conviction in our team and the experience of guiding companies at our stage to success.
This is key milestone for the company, but not the time to celebrate. Another 1.8 million in the US will be diagnosed with this disease in 2021. A lot more work needs to be done.
Here We Go!
