A San Francisco-based biotech advised by experts, including Moderna co-founder Robert Langer, has chosen Australia as its research base as it works to change the way the world detects cancer.
Earli is backed by high-profile investors including Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz. The start-up was founded by serial entrepreneur Cyriac Roeding and Stanford University scientist Dr Sam Gambhir, a researcher into early cancer detection who lost his only son to brain cancer.
Cyriac Roeding is chief executive of US biotech Earli, which is basing its first human trials for a new cancer detection tool in Australia.
Roeding had co-founded Shopkick, an e-commerce app which sold to Korean firm SK Telecom for $US250 million ($331 million) in 2014. He was looking for his next venture and was prompted by an article he saw in a Stanford University magazine about Dr Gambhir’s research to contact him. The pair later spun out Earli’s core technology into a standalone company.
Earli is trying to address one of the key challenges in treating cancers: not finding them early enough. “Instead of looking for cancer, what if we forced the cancer to reveal itself?” Mr Roeding, chief executive of the business, said.
The company’s technology, which is being trialled at sites in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, involves injecting a compound into patients, which prompts cancerous cells to make a synthetic, non-human biomarker.
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The cancer can then be prompted to produce an enzyme that will “eat up” a radioactive tracer that is injected into the body, letting doctors see where a dangerous tumour is even if it can’t yet be picked up by traditional imaging.
According to Mr Roeding, the technology could stop doctors from having to watch and wait for the growth of a tumour before they know how they should treat it.
“That’s euphemistically called ‘watchful waiting’ – but you want that intervention before you have a tumour with multiple mutations,” Mr Roeding said.
