In November 2016, German-American businessman Cyriac Roeding read a biography of Sam Gambhir, a physician and scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine, in a magazine. In the article, Gambhir explained how he dedicated his career to cancer diagnosis, but lost his teenage son Milan to a brain tumor in 2015.
Roeding, the founder and former CEO of mobile shopping app Shopkick, was intrigued by Gambhir’s story and immediately emailed him, asking to meet. Over the next few months, the two developed a friendship and Gambhir became Roeding’s guide to the complex world of biology and engineering.
One day, Gambhir gave his opinion- a touching one. “Sam asked a simple but profound question,” Roeding recalls. He said, ‘Why don’t we stop looking for cancer; What if we don’t look again? What if, instead, we forced the cancer to reveal itself?’”
With cancer, time is of the essence – the earlier it is detected, the longer the patient can live. Early cancer detection has become an important factor in oncology – there are many companies working on liquid biopsy technology, which analyzes blood samples to find fragments of DNA shed by cancer cells. But this was not good enough for Gambhir. His painful experience told him that waiting for the cancer to grow enough to show up in the blood was too late, and it didn’t tell you anything about where to find the tumor. “We can’t rely on cancer markers that nature can’t always give us,” Roeding said. “But like us bioengineer the sign, then the primary tumors can always appear. “
It is the foundation of Earli, which Roeding and Gambhir founded together in June 2018. The California-based startup has already raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Benioff, and Khosla Ventures.
Early’s method forces the cancer to manifest itself. Bioengineered DNA is injected into the body; when it enters cancer cells, it forces them to produce a synthetic biomarker that is not found in humans—something like limonene, a chemical found in the peel of citrus fruits. If a follow-up breath or blood test finds the biomarker, it could be a sign of cancer.
The next step is to find out where the cancer is in the body. The injection causes the cancer cells to release a protein that produces a radioactive tracer, so that it can be seen by the eye on a scan. Diagnosing cancer makes it treatable – doctors can use precise radiation or targeted surgery to remove it. Earli plans to use the same method to target and treat cancer – killing cells when they are found – although the idea is still in its infancy.
The plan is for Earli to be used in every area of cancer prevention and treatment: for disease control in high-risk groups such as smokers; in treatment, to determine if there is cancer elsewhere in the body; for treatment, to make tumors easier for doctors to find; and after treatment, to detect any recurrence of cancer.
