KC’s next big opportunity might be computational medicine—applying Big Data to medical research and health care.
A growing number of researchers, doctors and, yes, entrepreneurs are finding new ways to use Big Data to develop drugs, diagnose illnesses and improve the health care experience.
It’s a relatively young field called computational medicine. Software can be used to analyze enormous sets of data—not just health records and genetic profiles from one patient, but thousands or millions—and quickly find patterns that human researchers might otherwise miss.
Ultimately, it could help make precision or personalized medicine a possibility for most Americans. Oncologists, for example, would be able to prescribe the type of treatment that’s proven to be most effective for patients with similar genetics and whose cancer cells share similar mutations.
Thanks to computational medicine, a California startup named Carmenta developed a blood test that finds the proteins associated with preeclampsia during pregnancy—providing a level of diagnostic accuracy that hasn’t been available before. And the company did this in about two years.
Closer to home, Cerner has launched a pilot project to analyze the DNA of some employees (who volunteered) to help them predict and prevent health problems.
“There are all sorts of ways this data can be utilized,” said Dr. Wayne Carter, president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute (KCALSI).
Computational medicine has the potential to be a sweet spot for the Kansas City area because it combines two of the region’s strengths: life sciences research and computer science.
“It’s difficult to think of another city that would have the commercial and academic strengths that we have here in Kansas City,” said Mark Hoffman, chief research information officer at Children’s Mercy Hospital.
The region is home to Cerner and Netsmart, leaders in electronic health records, as well as a string of startups involved in computational medicine.
Children’s Mercy, Saint Luke’s, the University of Kansas, Truman Medical Centers, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, K-State, Mizzou—all of them have an interest in this type of research.
Groups like KCALSI have been working to connect local companies and institutions, with an eye toward making Kansas City a nationally known hub for this type of work, in the same way the KC Animal Health Corridor has earned a global reputation.
If Kansas City can do that, the financial rewards could be sizable. According to a report from IndustryARC, the U.S. market for computational medicine and drug discovery software could hit $6.78 billion by 2020.
Curious what computational medicine looks like in practice? There are already a few smaller Kansas City companies that are active in the field.
A Faster Path to New Medicines
Local startup Zorilla Research has created a software solution that helps pharmaceutical companies predict if any of their in-development drugs might have unexpected consequences or “off-target effects.”
That way, drug developers can investigate problems early on (or even abandon a hopeless project) before wasting a great deal of time and money.
And because humans and animals share many genes in common, Zorilla can point out when a drug designed with people in mind might be useful to other species, and vice versa.
Zorilla was founded by Gerald Wyckoff, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The startup grew out of his research as an evolutionary biologist.
He was trying to answer, in his words, a pretty esoteric question. Humans, gorillas and other primates share common ancestors and have genomes that look similar, but function differently. Wyckoff wanted to figure out what their common ancestors’ genes would have looked like.
In the process of solving that problem, he and his team built, essentially, a search engine that can show how particular molecules—the kind that might be part of new drugs—will affect different types of proteins.
Wyckoff decided to start a company that would license this research and bring it to market. “I thought there was potential here, and the university did as well,” he said.
Since it started in 2013, Zorilla has raised an undisclosed amount of investment and secured support from the Missouri Technology Corporation and Digital Sandbox KC.
The startup also has received a lot of interest from KC-area companies because it overlaps human and animal health. Recently, Wyckoff said, he was talking to a professional contact on the coast about Zorilla Research. That person had no idea that some drugs work on both humans and animals.
“I wouldn’t have started this business if I wasn’t in Kansas City,” Wyckoff said, “because nobody would know what I did.”
More Effective Delivery of Health Care
Local companies are also developing solutions that help hospital and health care providers operate more effectively. TeraCrunch, a Leawood startup, has developed an “advanced analytics app store” for clients in health care. These apps are used by payers, providers and health care services organizations for clinical optimization, revenue cycle management and marketing optimization.
TeraCrunch’s marketing analytics apps can be customized for other industries, such as law, telecom, media or consumer goods, but at least 50 percent of its growth right now is in health care, founder Tapan Bhatt said. Eventually, that number will probably climb to 75 percent.
Health care is a ripe market for companies like his because there’s so much inefficiency. Also, many health care providers don’t have the capability or interest to develop an enterprise-level analytics solution in-house. That opens the door for providers like TeraCrunch.
“Therefore, it’s a bigger opportunity for us,” Bhatt said.
Clients like working with TeraCrunch because its applications produce relatively speedy results. Typically, the startup generates a return on investment within six weeks.
“We know we can help them take a problem and scope it in a much better, more meaningful way and deploy efficiently,” Bhatt said.
It’s easy to get excited about computational medicine’s potential for developing new therapeutics. But applying Big Data to the clinical practice—how health care is delivered—could be just as important, said Hoffman of Children’s Mercy.
“That cycle is much shorter than the cycle of discovering a new therapeutic and can have a very tangible impact on the patient experience,” Hoffman said.
Right now, several local groups—including Truman Med and UMKC—are examining data to support quality improvement. For example, they could compare blood draws taken by nurses to those done by phlebotomists, to see which group has fewer repeat collections.
‘Give Us a Voice’
Amado Guloy is the founder of Rex Animal Health, the developer of a solution for managing the health of large groups of livestock.
Its platform can track and predict the spread of illness in herds, while highlighting the hardiest animals, which might be the best candidates for breeding. The data that Rex Animal Health collects could also be used by animal health companies looking to develop more effective pharmaceuticals.
Guloy praised KCALSI, which included him in a committee on computational medicine. Guloy has been able to speak at local conferences and made sales connections as a result.
“KCALSI has been absolutely amazing and incredibly generous to us,” Guloy said. “That has definitely helped us along the way.”
His advice for Kansas City: Make sure that smaller companies have a voice in joint research efforts and other projects.
Sure, the region has large companies with expertise in health technology—it would be very easy to just let them dominate. But local startups have often built solutions that, because they’re specialized, may be more advanced.
“Just because we don’t have billions of dollars in funding doesn’t mean we can’t make an impact,” Guloy said.
This fall, Rex Animal Health was selected for the FAST Advisory Program, an accelerator operated by the California Life Sciences Institute. Startups are coached by advisers from companies like Genentech and Palantir. It’s a level of corporate interest and support that Guloy didn’t always get in Kansas City.
Plus, with FAST, startups don’t have to give up any equity.
“Something like that in Kansas City, especially with the strengths that it has, would be transformative for any young company in the life sciences area,” Guloy said.
Entrepreneurs will play a critical role in developing Kansas City’s computational medicine sector, KCALSI’s Carter said. They’re the ones who will help translate the research into real-world applications.
“Oftentimes, technologies, if they don’t get commercialized, they won’t be widely used or accepted,” he said.
To help foster collaboration between entrepreneurs, researchers and others, KCALSI hosts events like its Collaborate2Cure events, where stakeholders can share insights on immunotherapy and other areas of research.
Carter is optimistic about Kansas City’s chances of making its mark in computational medicine. It’ll take a lot of cooperation between a range of partners and institutions, but that’s something that Kansas City traditionally likes to do.
“Really,” he said, “what we’re trying to do is develop an entire ecosystem.”
