Creating a company during a pandemic crisis might be regarded as a complex and challenging task, but not for our founders. Cancer research needed more and better advancements, and they were convinced they had the ideas to bring about a change in the current landscape of Oncology.
So, to mark the first anniversary of our company's foundation last September and as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we want to share the thoughts and motivations in the minds that are behind REVEAL GENOMICS.
The creation of REVEAL GENOMICS meant moving a step beyond all the lab knowledge collected over the last several years. The goal is to improve patients lives with the results of the collaborations of a group of professionals who have worked jointly on various projects, sometimes over decades.
"I run a basic and translational research lab In an academic setting and we have made important findings in our field, but academia typically does not take these findings to actual clinical use. Creating REVEAL was an exciting opportunity with promising new approaches, and the chance to work with Aleix and Patricia was stimulating and sounded like an excellent idea. However, above all, I think that a strong motivation to join the new company was the fact of having a great team, with complementary skillsets, and exciting new clinical approaches, and I wanted to be part of it."
"We created REVEAL GENOMICS because we detected a definite need for bringing new biomarkers into the clinic. As a medical oncologist, I often feel frustrated because I do not have the right tools to make personalized decisions in the clinic. The creation of this promising company is making new information available to physicians as well as providing new methods of accessing the genetic code, thus helping patients and oncologists make important treatment decisions."
What makes REVEAL GENOMICS so unique is our straightforward proposition: we want to help physicians make decisions and manage patients in a better and more efficient way.
"Decision makers and clinicians have so many options; they have so many ways of treating our patients right now that I think what is critical for us is to try to figure out not only the right decision but being able to clearly explain to others the reasons behind it.
You can run a test and it will reveal some intelligence and provide an explanation in reference to the sample, but can it help you make a decision? Complementing the science with this additional and critical clinically informative data to help make the right decisions is what REVEAL can bring to the table."
The ultimate goal behind the creation of REVEAL GENOMICS is patient wellbeing. The critical questions are: How can we help patients? How can their disease be better treated? How can we give them hope from among all the options available?
"We are developing tools that will allow us to predict or improve the response to specific treatments in patients. In addition to being predictors, these tools can inform us about tumor behavior and biology.
REVEAL therefore embodies the coming together of different fields of knowledge, some technical and some clinical, thus providing us with the ability to develop many more tools in the future. These will consist of many specific genomics-based tests that cover a multitude of aspects of clinical care.
We are convinced we will soon become part of patient care routine. This has already begun to be used for smaller panels and we plan to use merged panels in tissue and liquid biopsy, which will undoubtedly become a standard in the future."
So far, genomics linked to clinical outcomes has been shown to help understand the biological processes associated with prognosis or treatment benefit. More importantly, it has helped to identify biomarkers or tools that guide treatment decisions, and we believe this is just the beginning.
"When Aleix shared with me an idea that could become a new and exciting challenge in my professional life, I said yes. The concept was very appealing and, as an added bonus, I really liked both the project setup and the team. The complementary visions of an oncologist, a lab person like me devoted to developing tools for patients, basic researchers like Charles and Joel, and Patricia´s experience, all sounded like an excellent match, and it’s proving to be so!
So my purpose in joining REVEAL GENOMICS is to be able to develop tools that can help patients and, at the same time, assess patient treatments in a more accurate way.”
REVEAL GENOMICS founders believe that the impossible is possible and work relentlessly to accomplish it. It is the pursuit of a dream that makes our company so inspirational and unique.
"The world of diagnostics is more challenging than the world of clinical trials, and it fits in with my desire to innovate, create an enterprise and set up a team. REVEAL GENOMICS was born after having read a synopsis from Aleix about a marker to select patients to be treated with immunotherapy, which was one of the last funded projects we worked on together at SOLTI. We were making a considerable effort both from the scientific and operational side of the clinical development, so the next natural step after finding these discoveries was to bring them to the clinic and offer them to the society. We thought that the best way to do it was through creating our own company."
Prediction and prognosis: those are the words of the future for our company. A combination of knowledge and its application will change the way biomarkers are used in oncology.
“We are developing two innovative biomarkers for which we are setting up the entire logistical and operational structure. We are confident that these tools will mark a turning point in the approach and treatment of breast cancer, where our initial focus will be in Europe. However, the goal is to expand the portfolio and extend our operations to the United States."
We want Reveal Genomics to be a global company. Besides that, we are setting up strategic partnerships that will enable us to refine precision oncology and improve the patient cancer care journey.
"I think the future of cancer genomics and clinical testing lies in integrated biomarkers. The typical approach of "one protein, one drug" has pretty much run its course and true biology is more complicated than this; there are tumor cells, mutations, copy number changes, immune cells, fibroblasts, and interactions between all of these."
The future is about combining these things together to make more powerful predictors, rather than just focusing on a single molecular alteration. This is what we are doing with our products at REVEAL GENOMICS.