It’s not every entrepreneur who hatches an idea for a business with her mother, let alone when they’re hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro. Away from daily distractions like email and a smartphone is where Cancer IQ co-founder and CEO Feyi Olopade was vacationing with her mom, Dr. Olufunmilayo (Funmi) Olopade — the director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics at the University of Chicago School of Medicine. They developed an idea for how to create a clinical decision support tool based on a technology platform her mother helped develop to make personalized cancer care more accessible and more efficient.
In a phone interview, the Rock Health accelerator graduate and resident of Chicago incubator 1871, talked about how the conversations with her mother during that trip gave her a better understanding and appreciation for her work in cancer research and inspired her to shift from her career in private equity and investment banking.
The technology platform Funmi Olopade developed with Dr Ian Foster, Director of the Computational Institute at the University of Chicago, and a team of researchers, supports the integration of clinical genomics and outcomes data. This allowed researchers and oncologists to quickly develop insights that would have otherwise been trapped in various IT systems and data warehouses. Researchers at the University of Chicago were able to use this large repository of high quality data on cancer cases to improve research productivity and accelerate discovery, Olopade explained.
“We have started to understand why patients are not eligible for genetic testing,” said Feyi. “The biggest challenge is that it tends to be a time consuming process to get the full extent of a patient’s history and multiple generations of their family. It’s a big barrier to people even starting a conversation on genetic testing.”
CancerIQ is developing a set of applications using that big data platform called CancerIQ Risk. It is designed to reduce the amount of time it takes oncologists to identify patients who could benefit from genetically informed treatment, steer patients to genetic counselors and testing labs and use complex data to find precision treatments.
“The barriers to the holy grail of personalized medicines are starting to fall. The last barrier to making this something doable is making it less cumbersome for doctors,” Feyi said. “If you can offer these services at a hospital for smaller practices that is big win.”
Update The company is halfway through a series of pilot studies. In April, the company launched pilots with five hospitals and is moving on to its next stage this fall. Preliminary results showed that CancerIQ can help physicians deliver cancer genetics services in one-third of the time and at a small fraction of the cost, according to Feyi.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
It plans to time the launch of its risk assessment tool with Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October.
