Meet 12 Startups Helping to End Cancer as We Know It
This month, as we highlight the End Cancer Health Moonshot, we bring you the innovative entrepreneurs, companies, and products upgrading how we fight this deadly disease.
For 2021, we’re excited to introduce Moonshot Programming where we highlight leading Health Transformers focused on our 12 health moonshots. This month, we’re showcasing the Health Transformers working on developing innovative solutions to help end cancer. Scroll on to learn more.
According to the American Cancer Society, there will be an estimated 1.9 million new cancer cases diagnosed and 608,570 cancer deaths in the United States in 2021, translating into approximately 206 new cancer cases and 69 cancer deaths every hour of every day. Among the many challenges we face is that cancer isn’t a single disease, but a large collection of diseases “all categorized by the uncontrolled proliferation of cells,” as stated by the American Association for Cancer Research.
As discouraging as this sounds, there are thousands of research-driven advances that have been made against cancer, highlighting the continued progress being made to fight this deadly illness. For instance, our portfolio consists of over 350 companies, 12 of which are working vigorously to develop innovative solutions to defeat cancer once and for all.
Get to know the StartUp Health companies that are innovating in the End Cancer Health Moonshot.
Cancer University
After losing one of the most important people in her life to cancer, CEO & Co-founder Andrea Wilson Woods set out to empower and educate people on combating cancer. She teamed up with Edward Hinton and co-founded Cancer U, an online membership library that hosts educational and empowerment programs for cancer patients and their families. The platform allows providers to reach patients in their homes, eliminating the need for patients to go to the hospital and alleviating treatment centers already overburdened by bureaucracy.
Cubismi
Moira Schieke, MD, radiologist, inventor, cancer imaging expert, CEO & Founder at Cubismi, is on a mission to launch critical-need precision and cancer imaging technology into wide clinical use in order to dramatically impact population health outcomes and ultimately cure cancer. Her team is building a second-generation telehealth platform that combines robust visual analytics and human body big data in an innovative, modern 3D interface to allow doctors to deliver key actionable visualizations — anytime, anywhere.
Elly Health
‘Feel better, together’ is the message co-founders Nikhil Pooviah, MD, and Simon Holland are sending to users. The duo has created an empathetic audio companion to help motivate, educate, and support patients to live healthier lives through improved participation in their own health for those living with chronic disease. The Elly platform is 100% digital and each day, patients listen to a 90-second daily summary of audio content through the smartphone app. Elly references a motivational story, discusses a condition-specific topic, and leaves patients with an inspirational message. ‘She’ also provides content around motivation, exercise, mindfulness, sleep, nutrition, and self-care strategies. As Elly gets to know each patient, the content gets more personalized. This ensures she takes into account each patient’s preferences, as well as their limitations.
GenID Solutions
For providers who want to screen patients for complex cancer conditions, GenID Solutions performs a cancer risk analysis on patients and can accurately predict which hereditary cancers they should be screened for. Co-founders Anita Singh and Anand Singh, MD, have developed low-bandwidth tools to save providers the time needed to do a cancer risk analysis and informs them only if the patient needs to be further screened with consult notes within electronic medical records (EMR). Once the patient’s condition is identified, the provider can help the patient make the best decision about next steps.
Gray Oncology Solutions
Scheduling multiple appointments for patients can be a complex process, that’s why CEO & Founder André Diamant, PhD, has created Gray Oncology Solutions, a scheduling platform that automatically generates scheduling templates specific to your center, ensuring your patients get the care they deserve as quickly and stress-free as possible. Gray allows providers to create a reusable scheduling template upon which you can slot in patients weekly that stays consistent with future changes in your center’s workflow. You can also generate a new scheduling template each week, to constantly account for changes in practice, as well as track metrics week-by-week to understand where you can increase efficiency gains even further.
LS CancerDiag
Professor Minna Nyström, PhD, CEO, Founder & Chairman, and partners Niklas Lahti and Philippe Arnez are on a mission to save millions of lives through early and accurate detection of Lynch syndrome, the world’s most common inherited cancer predisposition. The company’s Diagmmr® diagnostics innovation is designed to be a predictive diagnostic tool that enables preventive follow-up and counseling for affected mutation carriers who are at high risk for developing Lynch syndrome-related cancers.
MyPeople Health
CEO & Co-founder Alex Vealitzek and the team at MyPeople Health are on a mission toward preventing cancer. They help manage appointments, sort through information, store notes, and more with their care coordination platform designed for those seeking preventative cancer care and early detection screening.
OTAWA
Co-founders Paulo and Sergio Gusmão are working closely with one of the most respected oncology clinics in Brazil to create OTWonco, a comprehensive Oncology-EHR, created by and for cancer care professionals to completely manage an oncology clinic or hospital department from patient admission and scheduling, multidisciplinary medical records with protocols-based chemotherapy decision support and regimen, to drug inventory control, and treatment charge. The team has also developed a mobile solution, OTAWAcare, to enhance multi-hospital care continuity during patient hospitalizations. The app allows medical teams to record treatment at the point of care while providing effective real-time communication between members.
PEGASI
According to Luis Santiago, CEO, CTO & Co-founder at PEGASI, 70% of medical information in Latin America is still on paper. That’s why Santiago and his team are on a mission to be the leading solution for the management of healthcare information in the developing world. In just four simple steps, their HIPAA-compliant healthcare information system platform handles clinical, administrative, and financial information, aggregating it to detect endemic and epidemic diseases in real-time.
CEO & founder Jo Bhakdi is on a mission to save lives through early detection, better prevention, and more effective cures for all diseases, starting with cancer. With their Griffin Deep Genomics Platform, Bhakdi and his team are able to investigate every single copy of cell-free DNA in a blood sample and gain a uniquely deep and comprehensive insight into the body’s current health status, helping inform early cancer detection, prediction of disease onset, as well as non-invasive treatment monitoring for longer healthier lives.
Knowing what to eat to maintain good health can be challenging. Knowing what to eat while battling a chronic condition can feel impossible. That’s why CEO Susan Bratton created Savor Health, a digital health company that provides personalized nutritional strategies to prevent and manage the symptoms of chronic disease in order to improve adherence, compliance, and survival, reduce healthcare costs, enhance the quality of life, and develop real-world data insights. The company has focused on oncology first due to its clinical and nutritional complexity.
Welwaze
Founder Alex J. Ness is on a mission to leverage science and technology to prevent women from dying of breast cancer. He has developed Celbrea®, a fully-integrated breast health monitoring system to be used by physicians as an adjunct to routine physical examination including palpation, mammography, and other established procedures for the detection of breast disease.
We’re in This Together: Collaboration in the End Cancer Moonshot
On February 11, 2021, meet five of these extraordinary Health Transformers in our next Health Transformer Showcase.
Digital health entrepreneur? Don’t make the journey alone. Learn more about the StartUp Health Community and how StartUp Health invests.
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