#44 - Predicting cancer treatment response - Andre Esteva - Artera

Impulse - Meeting Healthcare Pioneers

One of the greatest fantasies in medicine is to one day be able to offer any patient a therapy perfectly adapted to their profile and needs.

A "personalized" medicine.

The term was introduced to the public in 1999 through an article in The Wall Street Journal titled "New Era of Personalized Medicine: Targeting Drugs for Each Unique Genetic Profile."

The enthusiasm for these next-generation therapies was fueled by advances in DNA sequencing, which hinted at future discoveries in genomics and rapid progress in medicine.

Twenty-five years later, it is clear that personalized medicine has become a reality (e.g., for the treatment of cancer or rare diseases), and technological progress continues to bring us closer to this ideal.

But while developing new personalized therapies is one approach, identifying the most effective current therapies for each patient is another, equally powerful one.

And thanks to the multimodal analysis capabilities enabled by AI, this field is rapidly expanding.

Andre Esteva is one of the pioneers in this area, having significantly advanced medical research in this direction before venturing into entrepreneurship to make this technology available broadly.

In less than three years, his company Artera has already achieved many things that most healthtech startups take much longer to reach:

• The launch of the first AI-based predictive test to evaluate treatment response to hormonal therapy in prostate cancer.
• The inclusion of the test in the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines nationwide.
• The obtention of federal reimbursement for the test.

In this episode, Andre shares his vision of predictive medicine in the AI era, the potential of this technology for complex diseases such as cancer, and the keys to their success and recognition on the international medical scene!

Timeline:

• 00:03:24 - Andre’s background as a researcher and entrepreneur in medical AI
• 00:06:01 - The origins of Artera and the vision of personalizing therapy for cancer patients
• 00:09:29 - Why AI is so relevant for predictive and prognostic medical applications
• 00:11:51 - How the ArteraAI Prostate Cancer test works
• 00:19:57 - Getting the test included in national guidelines within a year
• 00:24:16 - Developing further therapy prediction tests for cancer and beyond
• 00:26:03 - Lessons learned from securing national reimbursement within two years
• 00:29:22 - Andre’s view on current and future applications of AI in medicine

What we also talked about with Andre:

• Salesforce
• H&E stain
• Prostate-specific antigen
• Chemotherapy
• Computer vision
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• AI agents
• AlphaFold
• NeurIPS
• Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference
• Marc Benioff

We cited with Andre some of the past episodes of the series:

• #43 - Rethinking medical prescriptions to save lives - Emmanuel Bilbault - Posos
• #41 - Making sense of the gut microbiome - Leo Grady - Jona
• #40 - Cracking biology through AI - Jean-Philippe Vert - Owkin
• #36 - Turning healthcare preventive with full-body MRI scans - Andrew Lacy - Prenuvo

As Andre mentioned during the episode, you can read their landmark paper published in npj Digital Medicine in 2021 to dive deeper into the technology they have developed.

For further information about Artera’s publications and all the scientific work they do, take a look at the News & Insights section of their website.

You can follow Artera’s activities on LinkedIn and X, and get in touch with Andre via LinkedIn!

If you want to give me feedback on the episode or suggest potential guests, contact me over LinkedIn or via email!

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