1. SEPTEMBER 19, 2016
SANDIEGOBUSINESS JOURNAL
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Igor Tsigelny
CUREMATCH INC.
CEO: Stephane Richard
Revenue: Not disclosed
No. of local employees: 5
Investors: Analytics Ventures
Headquarters: JLABS, Torrey Pines
Year founded: 2015
Company description: Software firm
developing a treatment database and
guidance tool for cancer doctors
Key factors for success: Hot market,
unmet need in oncology space, quickly
scalable at relatively low cost, some early
investors already on board
Razelle Kurzrock
Plotting
The Course
Jamie Scott Lytle
Stephane Richard of CureMatch Inc. believes the startup’s software can transform cancer treatment.
BIOTECH: Co.’s
Software, Data Bring Key
Information To Choosing
Cancer Treatments
n By BRITTANY MEILING
The buzz in San Diego is that our soft-
warehubisgrowing,butthecity’struesweet
spot is where science and software meet.
Few know that better than Stephane
Richard, CEO of the local software
startup CureMatch Inc. The company
has developed a substantial database
and software program with the am-
bitious goal of helping doctors treat
cancer with data-driven guidance.
Surprisingly, the medical space contin-
ues to lag when it comes to data-driven
tools. Where Amazon and Facebook
excel, the health care system fails due to
disparate silos of information, and an
overall sluggishness of the industry when
it comes to adopting new technologies.
CureMatch intends to break into this
space with its high-tech tool for doctors,
one that may bring us closer to the
promise of precision medicine.
The Promise
Many have heard the health care
buzzword “precision medicine,” but the
idea has been harder to carry out than
first thought — especially when it comes
to treating cancer. Cancer varies greatly
from person to person, and one-size-fits-
all chemotherapy treatments are quickly
becoming a thing of the past.
Drugmakers now know that certain
cancers respond better to specific drugs,
but there is a huge variety of genetic
variation (and a huge variety of on-
cology drugs on the market). To make
matters more difficult, many cancer
researchers see promise in giving cancer
patients combinations of multiple drugs
that are proving more effective than
using just one or two.
“There are about 300 drugs you can
use for cancer, and that means there
are about 45,000 combinations of two
drugs, and 4.5 million combinations of
three drugs,” Richard said. “And you
can’t have clinical trials for 4.5 million
combinations.”
That means that physicians are left in
the lurch when it comes to prescribing
treatments for cancer.
“Each patient becomes an experi-
ment,” Richard said.
The Software
CureMatch’s software wouldn’t solve
all the problems facing cancer doctors,
Richard said, but it would be a step in
the right direction.
The company’s database connects
multiple sources of cancer research and
scientific data, and combines it with
reports issued by molecular diagnostic
companies that show which drugs are
currently working with specific cancers.
Combining all of the disparate knowl-
edge helps CureMatch crunch and kick
out suggestions for drug combinations.
The result is a software program that’s
basically “plug and play”for physicians.
The doctor inputs the patient’s infor-
mation, and the software generates a
suggested treatment program.
The exciting part is that a database
like this would only get better with
time. As more doctors log combination
treatments — and their outcomes —
CureMatch’s algorithm would become
smarter. A “supervised learning algo-
rithm,” Richard calls it.
The Market
CureMatch, a startup founded just
last year, caught the attention of inves-
tors at Analytics Ventures, which funded
the company early on.
“What excited us about CureMatch
was the caliber and expertise of the
team, and what they had already de-
veloped that was yielding promising
results,” said Navid Alipour, managing
partner at Analytics Ventures. “We
wanted to help take this technology
from a research capacity to market, in
a fight against cancer that has touched
all of our lives.”
Although Richard declined to spec-
ulate on the market potential of Cure-
Match’s software platform, he noted
that the cancer drug market was over
$100 billion and the molecular diagnos-
tics market was worth $12 billion-$15
billion.
“We’re looking to capture a small per-
centage of this market,” Richard said.
Richard said the company plans to
scale quickly, projecting that CureMatch
could bring in as much as $180 million
in annual revenue by 2021.
The Leadership
Of all companies prepared to take on
the daunting oncology market, Cure-
Match is well-equipped for the challenge.
The company was co-founded by
University of California, San Diego
oncologist and researcher Razelle Kurz-
rock, senior deputy
director of UCSD’s
venerable Moores
Cancer Center.
Kurzrock is best
known for orga-
nizing the largest
clinical trial pro-
gram in the Unites
States while at MD
Anderson Cancer
Center in Texas. In other words, she’s
quite familiar with problems facing the
oncology market.
Kurzrock founded CureMatch with
Igor Tsigelny, who now serves as the
company’s chief
technology officer.
Tsigelny is also a
UCSD research
professor at the uni-
versity’sdepartment
of neurosciences,
the San Diego Su-
percomputerCenter,
and the Moores
Cancer Center.
The two brought on Richard, a for-
mer Salk Institute for Biological Studies
researcher and the founder and president
of French BioBeach, to run the show.
The Traction
Richard hasmade remarkable traction
in less than one year. The company seems
to have support from every major start-
up-focused organization in San Diego.
CureMatch is enrolled in startup accel-
erator CONNECT’s Springboard pro-
gram, is currently housed at Johnson &
Johnson Innovation’s incubator, JLABS,
and was named a “Cool Company” this
year by San Diego Venture Group.
CureMatch is also being embraced
abroad. The company applied for an
envied spot at Dubai Future Founda-
tion’s accelerator, a three-month pro-
gram sponsored by the crown prince
of Dubai.
The program received over 2,200
applications this year, and only 35
companies were accepted. CureMatch
was one of them.
Richard said he expects the program
will connect CureMatch with strategic
partners and investors.
“We want to work with health insti-
tutions across the world,”Richard said.
“We have a global view.”
The company’s home, however, will
remain in San Diego, Richard said.
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