Volatomic Fingerprint

This year 35,000 American men will die from prostate cancer

•Prostate cancer is the most common male-specific cancer

•1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime

Only 25% of men complete the recommended yearly screening

•The PSA screening test for cancer is wrong 80% of the time

•Follow-up tests are unnecessary and extremely invasive

This year almost 400,000 men will die globally from prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is heavily weighted towards black men, including African Americans.

Additionally, we have a test in the works for breast cancer that is slightly more accurate, but 5x cheaper than existing methods and can be done anywhere in the world with a urine test rather than via mammogram in an expensive x-ray machine.

1. Collect urine
2. Perform spectroscopy on urine
3. Identify 'Volatomic Fingerprint' to detect prostate cancer

We identify unique volatile organic compounds found in urine… Just like Sherlock Holmes’s bloodhound, Toby!

Single urine test that detects prostate cancer

•4-times more accurate than the incumbent PSA test

•At the price of a drug test

•Urine- and not blood-based, which everyone prefers

USA:40 million men 50-69 should get screened for prostate cancer yearly

Global: 1.4 billion men 50-69 should get screened for prostate cancer yearly

About 25% of American men receive their yearly screening, and the rest, especially those unable to afford it do not. Globally, about 0.5% of men receive their screening.

This solution could save untold numbers of lives. 

My co-founder's family has direct contact with prostate cancer through a close cousin and understands the burden of not finding out before it's too late. Additionally, he has family members who were over-diagnosed, which lead to an incredible drop in quality of life... A  40 year old who needs to wear a diaper who also has erectile dysfunction.

Additionally, our Medical Director's parents are from Jamaica and Guatemala. These are two of the groups with the highest likelihood of developing this killer disease.

We have set up a lab in our Medical Director's hometown of El Paso Texas, which is an incredibly undeserved community of African and Latin Americas. These individuals are much more likely to develop prostate cancer and yet, screening rates are much lower than average, especially due to cost.

So far we have a prototype that is 4x more accurate than the PSA test for prostate cancer screening.

This prototype is also slightly more accurate, but +47x cheaper at detecting aggressive prostate cancer.

Our next step is to go into 'Clinical Validation' in El Paso to the undeserved community in the vicinity of our lab. 

We are looking for help in a few ways:

• Partners who can help us gather data to train our algorithm in undeserved communities, similar to our launch region in the border region of Texas and Mexico
• Partners who can help scale this test to undeserved communities

Our system is extremely innovative:

• It's urine-based, while most solutions are either biopsy or at best blood-based
• It uses spectroscopy, which almost nobody in diagnostics uses
• It's multivariate, which almost nobody in diagnostics uses

Our test outperforms other tests not just on one dimension, but all relevant dimensions; Accuracy, Affordability, and Ease.

This will change the prostate cancer diagnostics space and will literally change the life expectancy of some countries, like Jamaica.

All of this is independent of our breast cancer test. 

People use our prostate cancer screening test --> prostate cancer is found when it's indolent and not aggressive --> people survive treatment and health outcomes improve

Good health and well being

By 2030, drive the rate of prostate cancer screening from 0.5% to +50%.

By 2030, drive the rate of breast cancer screening to +50%.

The instrument we use is Thermal Desorption Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (TD-GC-MS).

Our real innovation is on the data science side, where we use a number of novel methods that in combination vastly improve performance.

2 FTE

Dragan Sebišanović, CSO

•Master of Science in Biotechnology

•R&D leader at 3 diagnostic startups (Color Health, Guardant Health, Convergent Genomics)

•Leader in 3 diagnostic startups that had successful exits

Matthew Laskowski, CEO

•Master of Science in Computer Science

•Senior Director of Strategy at two high-growth software companies

•Led the GTM strategy for +10 new products


2 PTE

Travis Gerke, Chief Data Officer

Harvard trained bioinformatician with +15 years in prostate cancer data science and experienced in FDA engagement

Hubert Fenton, Medical Director

Johns Hopkins trained physician with +20 years in healthcare and responsible for running our lab

About 11 months, with a number of team members (Travis and Hugh) only joining in the past 2 months.

Our team was assembled to bring diversity to our thought process. 

Dragan fled to Germany when NATO started napalming Serbia and eventually made it to the USA and finished his studies late. Matthew has lived in Hong Kong for 15 years and London for 6. Hugh comes from Afro-Caribbean descent and wants to bring this technology back to his home countries. Jackie is an extremely influential investor at GoldenSeeds in women's health for women-led startups, and Wen-Yee is a female professor from Taiwan living in southwestern Texas.

Establish a centralized lab and charge under $80 per test. In the USA, our test should only cost us $20 per person, and we would probably charge just that.

Low-Income client

Our test at $20 is in the price range of most Americans, especially as Medicare will pay $24.

What we are planning on doing is having Americans who can afford it pay more in order to subsidize those outside the USA (ex. Jamaica) who cannot.

In the USA, people will probably be willing to pay a slightly higher price (ex. $79 vs $80) in order to subsidize the test for someone else.