US-based Life Sciences Technology Company for Precision Medicine, Cellworks Focusing to Expand in India
The desire for personalization is seen across different dimensions of life. This desire becomes a need when it comes treatments for complex diseases like cancer.
In cancer because of genomic tumor variations across each patient - the same set of treatments does not work for all. Hence the response rate of treatments is less than 30% indicating that 3 out of 5 patients get the wrong treatment. Because of lack of one-size-fits all reason; the pharmaceutical companies making the treatments have to run bigger size patient clinical trials to demonstrate benefits for approvals to market. And with transition to value-based payment economic model - there is incentives to match patients with right treatments. This personalization of treatment for each patient is called precision medicine.
Cellworks is a Life Sciences Technology company for precision medicine. The company was incorporated in 2005. Cellworks technology R&D center is in India and all technology validation is done by partners in USA.
Cellworks has developed an engineering software factory workflow to create digital models of patients to predict treatment responses. The platform combines predictive simulation and machine learning for generating precision medicine products.
Cellworks offers products Singula and Ventura to clinicians. The product Singula predicts patient response to an explicitly queried treatment. The product Ventura asks for actionable treatment options for a given patient.
The company offers pharma partners the product to simulate clinical trials in a computer for identifying right target patients to improve response rates and to create treatments for specific patient segments.
In an interaction with BW Disrupt, Taher Abbasi, Co-founder & COO, Cellworks shared details about the company.
What is the scope of Precision Medicine in India?
Being precise requires ability to measure patient attributes and a predictive computational platform to use that information for the different use cases. The technology to measure patient attributes is available in India and the cost and time to access the information is reducing. This implying the scope for applying precision medicine in India is high.
What is the company growth and global perspective?
Since 2005, Cellworks has developed products to apply use of patient attributes for precision medicine in use cases. Different clinical studies are ongoing with academic medical centers - using retrospective data and prospective studies. We are partnering with patient advocacy groups, physicians, providers, payers and pharma for making medicine more precise.
What are your marketing plan in India?
Cellworks has a great presence in US whereas our main focus to expand in India as well. Yes, we are planning to partner with few physicians and providers for integrating Cellworks products.
Tell us about your investment details.
Cellworks was incepted in 2005, we have got two institutional rounds of funding by ‘Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures’ and our total investment is $27.5M.
What are the future growth plans?
We are constantly exploring new opportunities to set in Indian market. Future growth plans of Cellworks include both product development expansion to newer indications and partnerships which enable product rollout.
How healthcare sector is revamping through technology?
Technology is impacting nearly all facets of healthcare. We use technology whether in early diagnosis to monitoring of disease under treatment or providing decision support for treatment decisions to novel personalized options. Technology is central to medicine. Via technologies like electronic health records – we have organized archiving and access to patient specific attributes. The next wave is using that collection of big data to being precise use cases.
