Meet The Married Couple Who Just Raised $10 Million To Improve Cancer Treatments For Dogs
Four years ago, veterinary oncologist Dr. Mona Rosenberg had a patient with metastatic thyroid cancer. For two years, the dog was treated the way dogs traditionally are—with chemotherapy. But with large thyroid cancers, chemotherapy isn’t always very effective. Even though this course was going well, the cancer spread to one of the dog’s lymph nodes and lungs.
Often, this would be the end of the story. While the past few decades have seen a revolution in the way cancer is treated in humans, dogs are still treated with the same chemotherapies as they were in the 20th century—despite the fact that many of today’s modern cancer treatments were initially tested with dogs.
Ben Lewis, 38, and Christina Lopes, 45, the husband-and-wife team who’ve founded the San Francisco-based company One Health, want to change that. Its product, FidoCure, combines advances in genomics with those in AI to provide more personalized cancer treatments for dogs in conjunction with veterinarians and pharmacies, using insights gained from treating cancer in humans. The upshot is that as they do so, the data they gather can also be turned to the other end of the leash, providing insight in the treatment of human cancers as well.
“Everything’s tested on the dog for the human R&D paradigm,” says Lopes. “And it never comes back. So the dog remains the subject in this arc, and we’re, like, ‘No, we’re going to change this.’”
On Thursday, the company announced that it has raised a $10 million series A, led by Polaris Partners and Borealis Ventures. Existing investors Y-Combinator, Tau Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Hippeau also participated in the round, which brings the total amount of venture capital the company has raised to about $16 million.
“We might examine a mutation and biomarker in a dog that’s in a different location than a human, but the data may still be relevant.”
Lopes and Lewis first met in 2012 in Brazil, Lopes’ native country. Lewis at the time had started a Sao Paulo-based company distributing animal health supplies in South America. Lopes was also in Sao Paulo looking at entrepreneurial opportunities when the two met at a conference. One thing they had bonded over was an interest in veterinary care and animal health.
“I was, like, ‘Oh my God, we have to fix this!’” Lopes recalls upon learning about what she calls the “dysfunctional space” of data collection in animal health.
After being married in 2013 and having two children together, the couple founded One Health in San Francisco in 2016 and began work on its FidoCure product. It later became part of the Winter 2018 session of the YCombinator accelerator. It was during this founding and incubation period that the company developed its basic process.
Here’s how it works: First, the company sequences the genes of a tumor cell from the dog. This helps highlight what mutation may be causing the cancer. That genomics data in turn enables FidoCure to provide a personalized report of recommended medications to veterinarians, who can use it to guide treatment decisions. The report also recommends FDA-approved cancer drugs being used for humans, which can be applied to dogs without additional regulatory steps. The company also works with a compounding pharmacy to develop dosages for the drugs, which are titrated to be more appropriate for canine patients (flavors are sometimes added as well—beef liver being a particular favorite).
Keep reading the full article from Forbes.
Image: Ben Lewis and Christina Lopes /ONE HEALTH