Pahtiā Technologies on a mission to revolutionize cancer care
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Making the newest innovations in cancer care accessible globally is at the heart of Pahtiā Technologies Inc. founded by Rubén de Jesús Medina, a two-time University of Notre Dame graduate.
Doing international fundraising for the university, Medina was first exposed to cancer research when he was involved in an academic research project between Notre Dame’s Harper Cancer Research Institute and Panama’s National Oncology Institute.
“Being there and seeing the need, the amount of people busing three/four hours every day, just to get to the hospital with the hope that maybe they’re able to get chemotherapy that day, was one of the most impactful scenes I have ever seen,” Medina said.
With research showing that cancer differed by country and ethnicity, Medina was fundraising for the project to find out why when the pandemic hit. Though the project came to a halt at this point, Medina said it remained at the back of his mind.
As with many, COVID was a soul-searching period for Medina who was looking to transition to another career as he had fallen in love with finance following a master’s degree in the subject.
“At the time, I was in my mid-30s, so I wasn’t going to go to Wall Street to crunch spreadsheets 20 hours a day. One of my professors encouraged me to think about venture capital,” he recalled. “That’s what pivoted me into VC after the pandemic and that’s when my family was affected by cancer. I got to see these new treatments called targeted therapies, how they’re changing the way cancer is addressed.”
With targeted therapies, Medina said oncologists believe cancer could go the way of diabetes; manageable with proper treatment. Recalling the need in Panama, Medina created Pahtiā to provide insights into cancer mutations that are missing from mainstream cancer research.
So far, the company has identified two major pain points for cancer patients in the region: cost and data bias. One, before recommending any targeted therapy, an oncologist would need to get a DNA and RNA analysis. This analysis is largely cost-prohibitive outside of the U.S., Europe and Japan. Secondly, existing therapies are geared towards cancer affecting people of European heritage.
“The cancers that affect those with European backgrounds are very different from the cancers that might affect people from other ethnicities,” he explained. “But the process to identify the mutations and the process to develop the medicine is the same, all you need is data.”
Pahtiā has now set out to build a bridge across these two problems. Currently, Medina said physicians in countries like Brazil, Panama and Guatemala would usually have to send tissue samples to the U.S. or Europe for analysis, costing patients between $5,000 to $10,000 just for genomic profiling.
“The amount of people that can afford that just for a single test is very few. So we’re trying to mitigate against that,” he added. “The whole shipping tissue sample back and forth, there’s a cost and a time delay. Time is of essence for a cancer patient.”
Medina speaks on the different steps involved in discovering cancer mutations.
The company plans to collaborate with two local laboratories in Latin America to get tissue samples from patients and sequence that sample for raw DNA/RNA data. Leveraging artificial intelligence, Pahtiā plans to employ machine learning and automation for analyzing the DNA/RNA data. Medina projects the costs to patients for genomic profiling and analytics would go down to about $1,500 initially.
“For example, there’s a very low incidence of stomach cancer in the United States but in Central America, it is one of the most aggressive types of cancer and one of the most prevalent. Since there isn’t a high incidence of stomach cancer in the U.S., there’s no targeted therapy because there’s no market” he said. “So how do you then identify what is the mutation of stomach cancer and then develop the pathway to create a drug target? That’s where the AI driven biomarker platform that we’re building comes into play.”
Once cancer mutations are identified, the company will then partner with a pharmaceutical company or a targeted therapy company to get into the actual clinical trials for the drug target.
For the initial training phase, Pahtiā AI will be fed information from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Launched in 2006, TCGA is the result of a research partnership between the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute focused on lung, ovarian and glioblastoma cancers. The project has generated large amounts of genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data from over 20,000 primary cancer and matched normal samples. The data is publicly available for use by the research community.
“We want to, one, build out our AI driven platform on existing data, then the important part is going to be calibrating the engine with new data,” Medina continued. “The calibration will happen with the data that we’re collecting on the genomic profiles in these new markets.”
Medina said his team intends to launch the genomic profile product this autumn and have signed partnership agreements with a hospital in Panama and another in Guatemala as well as a next-generation sequencing lab in Panama. By February 2025, Medina hopes to have validated the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
“The AI bit will take a little more time since we need to have enough data that we can confidently say we’ve calibrated the AI engine appropriately,” he added. “The more hospitals we do genomic profiles with, the more data we have to then feed into the AI engine. Ideally we would like to have an MVP of the AI engine for the biomarker discovery platform by next September.”
Originally from Mexico City, growing up in Tokyo and attending a school with 125 nationalities represented, Medina said he learned early on to identify people as people. While he acknowledged that less than 3% of VC funding went to underrepresented founders, including Hispanics, Medina said that the color that matters most to investors is green.
“They see a good business model, they see you’re able to forecast, you’re able to pitch your idea properly,” he said. “It’s focusing more on the mission and the vision of the company and the impact it can have.”
The company will begin its operations in Latin America and eventually branch out to South Asia and Africa. With just the top three cancers in these markets, Medina anticipates navigating a $2.15 billion market.
“Our mission again is to help save lives, it might take us a couple of months, it might take us a couple decades,” he said. “We’re definitely in it for the longevity to build a world class company that helps save lives.”