turn cancer into a chronic-but-manageable disease—much like current treatment of HIV.
Domain partner Kim Kamdar, who is joining Epic’s board, is quoted in the statement as saying, “We see that Epic’s technology will not only have a major impact on clinical cancer treatments but also on the development of new cancer therapeutics and companion diagnostics.”
The company, which now has 25 employees and is growing fast, has been conducting more than 12 early stage clinical trials of the technology with seven pharmaceutical partners, Nelson says. The Phase I and II clinical trials, which will ultimately involve more than 1,500 patients, are intended to combine Epic’s diagnostics technology with specific anti-cancer compounds to create companion diagnostic products for each oncology drug.
Proceeds of the venture funding will be used to get “commercial ready for these diagnostics as they move through the pipeline,” Nelson says. The company would need FDA approval for each companion diagnostic application.
[Corrected to show TSRI’s Peter Kuhn, not Epic Sciences, has been working with Eric Topol.] The company sees applications beyond cancer as well, Nelson says. For example, Scripps’ Kuhn has been working with the cardiologist Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and chief academic officer at Scripps Health, to detect a specific type of endothelial cell that is sloughed off before a heart attack.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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