clinical trials when he founded and ran iProcess Global Research, also in Dallas, expects his site to launch this summer.
Prompting all this activity is the fact that, on average, running a trial can cost about $1 million a day, a sum that pharmaceutical companies are keen to reduce. The current process makes it difficult, if not impossible, to garner real-time data showing when a trial has closed or is about to close. That means that only about 3 percent of cancer patients participate, leaving out a large group of people who might have been helped by new therapies, MolecularMatch says.
“In our tool, you can go to the Web and check every day for trials,” Coker says. “You can use it in real-time to empower both the patient and the physician in a way that’s just like a Google search.”
The need for such a service became apparent in early 2013 to James Welsh, an assistant professor in radiation oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, as advances in genetics have enabled tumors to be broken down into hundreds of variations.
Indeed, companies such as Foundation Medicine in Cambridge, MA, or Molecular Health, based in suburban Houston, have found such genetic sequencing to be a lucrative market, worth $5.9 billion in 2011, according to Booz Allen Hamilton. The firm estimates that the number of available tests has grown from 1,680 in 2008 to nearly 3,000 four years later. Today, genetic sequencing costs about $1,000, a fraction of the price a decade ago.
This era of precision medicine is bringing on a “tidal wave of data,” says Welsh, who is the company’s chief medical officer. “Ten years ago, everyone got the same treatment,” he added. “Now, it’s 100 smaller sub-diseases, and each needs a specific treatment.”
Welsh earlier this year connected with Nick Tackes, a programmer and husband of a fellow radiation oncologist, who has written the software that underpins MolecularMatch. Coker, a former executive at US Oncology Research in the Houston suburb of The Woodlands, joined the company as CEO last month, bringing
