DC startup offers cancer ‘concierge’ service

Startups like the D.C.-based cancer treatment company Perthera have helped drive the explosive growth in one of the fastest growing sectors in the medical industry – personalized medicine.

Perthera specializes in precision cancer analysis. It uses technology to profile the molecules in cancer tumors so as to be able to offer personalized treatment options.

Once a patient’s tumor is profiled, Perthera provides the analysis directly to the patient’s oncologist, Dr. Chip Petricoin, Perthera’s chief scientific officer, told What’s Working in Washington.

“We view ourselves as … a concierge service at a nationalized level,” Petricoin said. The process can be lengthy and difficult, including analysis and sampling, to find the perfect treatment for a patient’s specific cancer.

“It actually is a lot of work, and most community hospitals don’t have the infrastructure to do that,” he said. “I really view Perthera as kind of the archetypical ‘doing well by doing right.’ It is a company, it’s a for-profit entity, so we’re generating revenue by delivering this information to patients.”

Other members of the medical industry are beginning to pay attention. Perthera recently announced a partnership with pharmaceutical giant Novartis, to help find patients to participate in clinical trials. The company also partnered with the Pancreatic Cancer Alliance to deliver a democratized method of precision medicine nationwide.

Petricoin said that he chose Washington as a base for entrepreneurship because it’s “unbelievably rich in [its] health IT, and bioinformatics, and even the informatics infrastructure.”

With D.C.’s proximity to government agencies, there are a lot of “really smart people in this area that are dealing with big data,” he said.

“That’s what precision medicine is. It’s about information, and analyzing it in new ways,” he said.

And the whole capital region can benefit, Petricoin said. It’s important to foster an ecosystem in D.C. where stories and strategies of entrepreneurship are shared.

“You’re starting to get these collision zones. It’s the water cooler conversations that end up being the next best idea,” Petricoin said.

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