stipech

Everything about cancer sucks. Some of the most difficult decisions in cancer are what to do and when to do it: biopsy, resection, passive monitoring etc. Today, clinicians make irreversible calls like 1) do a biopsy or wait, 2) treat or monitor or 3) remove an organ or monitor, using tests that cannot see the full biology of either the body or the cancer. As a result, doctors often overtreat the wrong patients while missing dangerous cancers in others until it’s too late. Five years ago, a sibling trio of Purdue grads cold emailed me from Indianapolis. Their thesis was simple: the science in cancer detection and treatment isn't the bottleneck. The engineering is. Fix the engineering, and you can change the standard of care of cancer forever. We founded @EarlyIsGood together to do this. Here is our mid-decade update after five years (!) of toil. We’ve made some good progress. 1. The Engineering Unlock: Multiomics Most diagnostics fail because they are looking for a needle in a haystack. The results are modest and create many false positives and false negatives. We developed nanotechnology that amplifies the needle making it simpler for us to figure out what is going on. Our nanotechnology allows us to read DNA, RNA, and Proteins simultaneously from a single sample. We detect Proteins at attomolar sensitivity (1000x ELISA) and RNAs at PCR-level sensitivity all without extraction or amplification. Combining all three provides a full picture because:  - DNA tells you what mutations are present
- RNA tells you what the cancer is doing
- Proteins tell you how the body is responding 2. The Proof: Bladder Cancer  We started here because the standard of care today is barbaric. 800,000 people are under surveillance for bladder cancer, enduring invasive cystoscopies that still miss ~20% of tumors. We are finishing a multisite prospective trial now. Standard of Care (Cystoscopy): invasive, repeated every 3-6 months. Our bladder cancer test (BCDx): 92% sensitivity and 97% specificity from a simple urine sample. Most importantly, we catch the high-grade tumors that the current gold standard misses completely. 3. The Next Mountain to Climb: Prostate Cancer

If you’ve watched a father, brother, or friend get a high PSA result, you know the spiral that follows: months of terror, invasive procedures, and paralyzing uncertainty. 20M+ PSA tests are run annually. Most positives are false alarms, leading to 1M+ unnecessary, painful biopsies. Meanwhile, dangerous cancers are often missed. Current commercial tests hover below 50% specificity. That means for every two men they flag, one is a false alarm. We partnered with the Mayo Clinic to solve this. No blood draws. No rectal exams. Just a simple urine test. We are using the same platform that we validated on bladder cancer to achieve unprecedented specificity without sacrificing sensitivity, effectively separating those who need treatment from those who don't.  We will soon be commercializing both our bladder and prostate cancer tests widely. Follow us @EarlyIsGood if you’d like to help or know when/where these tests are available.