PITCH PERFECT
Dr John Cassidy, co-founder and CEO of Cambridge Cancer Genomics, gives us his business pitch
What's your pitch? At Cambridge Cancer Genomics, we care that each patient has the right drug, at the right time, to beat their cancer. We want to understand what the molecular drivers of the tumour are, how they and the tumour change over time, and how these things affect therapeutic decisions. We founded the company about three years ago. The co-founders and I met while doing PhDs and postdocs at the University of Cambridge and at King’s College London. We went through Y Combinator in summer 2017, raised our first funding and then came back to Cambridge to build out a team and prove our technologies. What makes you unique? Our focus on longitudinal monitoring: we don’t think about cancer as a static disease, but rather as a dynamic, changing disease that needs to be treated as such. The questions we What’s the background of the company?
are asking are: how do we predict and monitor how a tumour changes over time? How will that affect therapy? And how, in the future, do we use that information to recommend the best therapeutic regime for an individual patient? Biggest achievement so far? One is being named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, along with my co- founders; another is being named on Business Weekly ’s Killer 50 list. The latter was particularly exciting because of the rest of the companies on the list: we were up there with giants such as Astrazeneca, which was incredibly humbling. But really, our greatest achievement is the brilliant team
we have built: 25 very talented people brought together to work on interesting problems. Biggest challenges? At our heart, we are a machine learning-driven company, which means we require a lot of data. The data we look at is longitudinal cancer genomic data, and there’s not really a lot of it available out there. When it is available, it can be low quality, it can be very sparse data, it can be very difficult to work with and it’s also quite expensive to collect. So one of our main challenges is ensuring we have enough good-quality data to feed our machine learning models. Which individuals or companies are your biggest inspirations? There are a couple of really inspirational people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list with us and also some really fantastic start-ups. One person that springs to mind is Noor Shaker, the founder of GTN, which is a sort of quantum drug discovery company, who I think is really inspirational. But really, I think the biggest inspiration for us is the community in Cambridge producing great work in the field of genomics: it’s truly inspirational to be surrounded by people who care about cancer genomics and its impact on healthcare. Where do you want the business to be in five years? I want the company to be in a position where we have the tools to enable precision oncology both in space and in time – so understanding how and when to give the right drug to the right patient – and I want to be able to use that information and those technologies to find underserved patient populations and do our best work for them.
The biggest inspiration for us is the community in Cambridge producing great work in the field of genomics"
Find out more about Cambridge Cancer Genomics at ccg.ai
27
ISSUE 03
cambridgecatalyst.co.uk
Powered by FlippingBook