Functional Drug Testing Combined with AI Transforming Cancer Care with Jim Foote First Ascent Biomedical

Jim Foote, Co-Founder and CEO of First Ascent Biomedical, is changing the standard of care for cancer treatment from 'try and hope' to 'test and treat'. The First Ascent platform combines functional drug testing of fresh biopsies, genomic sequencing, and an AI engine to assess a large panel of drugs and identify the most likely to be effective. Clinical data show a high correlation between how cancer cells respond in the lab test and how patients respond to the same drug, and is seen as a treatment guide for refractory cancer patients to identify novel drug combinations.

Jim explains, "Fundamentally speaking, if we look at everybody on this planet from a DNA and RNA perspective, there are 8 billion people, and each one of us is different from the others due to our DNA and RNA. So if we acknowledge that biologically we're all different, then the problem that we're trying to solve is if we're all different, why are we treating each patient with the same standard of care? A process that has existed for a hundred years, and again, they've made substantial advancements, but functional precision medicine is really an opportunity to move away from a standard that's based on the laws of averages and really treat people based on an individual level, developed by results that come from their individual biology."

"In oncology, these practices and standards have been developed over decades. And in some situations, some of these cancer protocols haven't been updated in decades. There had been continual advancements in things like immunotherapy. What I'll say is that in oncology, they're always looking for the silver bullet. It's in the genome, it's in a biomarker, it's in immuno-oncology, it's in an organoid, it's in all of those types of things. So they have always tried to find that silver bullet. Fundamentally, what we do in First Ascent is that we believe that we have enough bullets, per se. We have enough drugs, per se. We're just not using them in the right ways. "

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