News

MolecularMatch appoints Eric Pulaski as President

by

MolecularMatch appoints Eric Pulaski as President

Pulaski joins executive team to drive product strategy and revenue growth

Houston – June 24, 2019 – MolecularMatch, a leading clinical informatics company providing Precision Medicine software solutions for oncology, announced today that Eric Pulaski will serve as President for MolecularMatch.

Pulaski has over 30 years of experience across the technology and software sector. Pulaski was most recently the Founder and CEO of SmartVault Corporation, a leading SaaS provider in the online document management and secure portal space. He founded the company in 2007 and ultimately sold it to Reckon Ltd in 2016. He was the founder and CEO of BindView, where he grew that company into a leading, global Internet Security company with over $70M in revenues and 650 employees, and later sold to Symantec for over $200M. Pulaski also founded and served as CEO for several other tech companies, including RedFlag Software and Lightbulb Technology Partners.

As a serial entrepreneur, Eric’s specialties are developing and executing product strategy, building and retaining high-performing teams during high-growth and change, evangelism and communication, and managing shareholder and investor relationships.

“Eric’s experience as a seasoned entrepreneur, especially as it relates to software businesses, makes him the perfect choice in leading MolecularMatch through a very unique period for our company,” said James W. Welsh, MD, Founder at MolecularMatch. “I am confident he will spearhead strategic initiatives that will help us accelerate growth.”

Pulaski said: “MolecluarMatch is a visionary company with a vibrant culture at the forefront of innovation in the heart of the Texas Medical Center. I look forward to working closely with Jim and the leadership team to capitalize on the enormous market opportunities in front of us.”

About MolecularMatch

MolecularMatch, Inc. is a Houston, Texas based clinical informatics SaaS company founded in 2014 out of MD Anderson Cancer Center. The company was founded on the vision of using tumor molecular profiling, and outcomes from previously-treated patients, to provide the best personalized treatment for current patients. MolecularMatch delivers personalized, evidence-based therapeutic guidance and clinical trials matched to each patient. Customers include genetic labs, health information systems, biopharma, hospitals and cancer centers. Visit us at molecularmatch.com

Roche Launches First Two NAVIFY Clinical Decision Support Apps

by

Roche Launches First Two NAVIFY Clinical Decision Support Apps

Basel Switzerland – Roche (September 18, 2018) –

(RTTNews) – Swiss drug major Roche Group (RHHBY) announced Tuesday the launch of the first two NAVIFY clinical decision support apps: The NAVIFY Clinical Trial Match and NAVIFY Publication Search apps.

The two apps available on the NAVIFY Tumor Board facilitates oncology care teams access relevant clinical trial information and related publications more effectively.

NAVIFY Clinical Trial Match app identifies clinical trial options based on patient-specific attributes such as age, gender, biomarkers and various tumour information from 11 international registries.

NAVIFY Publication Search app mines publication sources globally for most recent clinically and therapeutically relevant literature.

The content of both apps is provided by MolecularMatch, Inc., a clinical informatics company with expertise in precision oncology, immunotherapy and bioinformatics.

According to the firm, the launch of these first two apps is the start of the NAVIFY apps ecosystem. More apps from Roche, partners and third parties will follow to expand the clinical decision support functionalities.

(RTTNews) – Swiss drug major Roche Group (RHHBY) announced Tuesday the launch of the first two NAVIFY clinical decision support apps: The NAVIFY Clinical Trial Match and NAVIFY Publication Search apps.

The two apps available on the NAVIFY Tumor Board facilitates oncology care teams access relevant clinical trial information and related publications more effectively.

NAVIFY Clinical Trial Match app identifies clinical trial options based on patient-specific attributes such as age, gender, biomarkers and various tumour information from 11 international registries.

NAVIFY Publication Search app mines publication sources globally for most recent clinically and therapeutically relevant literature.

The content of both apps is provided by MolecularMatch, Inc., a clinical informatics company with expertise in precision oncology, immunotherapy and bioinformatics.

According to the firm, the launch of these first two apps is the start of the NAVIFY apps ecosystem. More apps from Roche, partners and third parties will follow to expand the clinical decision support functionalities.

MolecularMatch Introduces MMPower Knowledge Base – Providing One of the Industry’s Most Dynamic Molecular Search Engines

by

MolecularMatch Introduces MMPower Knowledge Base – Providing One of the Industry’s Most Dynamic Molecular Search Engines

Houston, TX – TMC Innovation – Texas Medical Center (April 24, 2017) –

April 24, 2017 03:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time

April 24, 2017 03:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MolecularMatch has announced their new knowledge platform, MMPower. The Platform covers over 400 million alterations with the ability to process whole exomes in seconds. The complexity of genetic molecular data, in any format, is converted quickly by MMPower into understandable and meaningful information.

“We started with some of the best oncology minds in the world from a variety of institutions to create an automated way for applying clinical intelligence at the point of care. MolecularMatch’s automated technology reads and acquires thousands of genomic data sets weekly allowing our partners to efficiently provide evidence-based recommendations. Through Natural Language Processing we can examine and create associations among the information faster than any human can while applying the learned technology through our proprietary algorithms,” says MolecularMatch CEO, Mr. Kevin Coker. The MMPower platform can be utilized via a RESTful API or through access to a variety of solutions that augment different sectors of the precision medicine landscape. Organizations can customize MolecularMatch solutions to validate their molecular data assumptions or develop their own applications. MMPower is the foundation of MolecularMatch’s growing suite of solutions including:

  • Customized Somatic Assay Panel Design
  • Virtual Tumor Board Support
  • Molecular Profile Analytics
  • An Interactive Physician Engagement Portal containing dynamic reports
  • Molecular Diagnostic Reporting and Variant Exploration for Pathology Labs
  • Evidence-based Decision Support and Integration with enterprise technology such as LIMs and EMRs.

The company’s mission is to improve the adoption and utility of genomics for improving patient care. MolecularMatch also offers a complimentary clinical trial search capability allowing physicians and patients to search local clinical trials in their locality. Based in the heart of the Texas Medical Center, MolecularMatch is a clinical informatics company founded by Dr. James Welsh in 2014 with licensed technology out of MD Anderson Cancer Center. It is a technology first company that extracts insights from complex molecular information for organizations seeking to advance the clinical utility of genomics. Customers that benefit from our technology include biopharmaceutical, life sciences, and commercial diagnostic laboratories. Visit us at www.MolecularMatch.com today.

From The Broad to the Clinic | Front Line Genomics

by

From The Broad to the Clinic | Front Line Genomics

Cambridge, MA, Broad Institute (June 27, 2016) –

Today at the Festival of Genomics, Carl and Eleanor explore the ins and outs of genomic data in the clinic, and Liz joins a tour of The Broad Institute to see just where that data comes from.

The Broad Institute site visit

Liz Harley A room containing over 50 sequencers makes an odd noise. For one thing it’s very cold – all that machinery pumps out some serious heat – so there is a constant whoosh of air-conditioning. The machines themselves whirr softly, punctuated by a constant Morse code of beeps. That is the sound of data generation on a phenomenal scale. This was the final room on our tour of The Broad Institute, which so far had taken in everything from DNA extraction to seriously advanced automated sample preparation.

The Broad Institute, the largest sequencing laboratory in the world, has 28 Illumina HiSeqX sequencing machines (and 25 from previous iterations of the platform), each producing 1 terabyte of data every 2-3 days. This rate of production is so prodigious that the Institute has now moved its data storage out of a physical central server and into the cloud.

Rise of the machines / The Broad Institute sequencing laboratory

Aside from getting my first look at the legendary HiSeqX in action, the visit to The Broad also brought home just how much of a challenge the $1000 genome really is. For one thing, the electricity bill to run a sequencing room like this one runs into the millions. And outsourcing data into the cloud is not always a cheap option, although it does save on valuable floor space that could be taken up with MORE SEQUENCERS. In reality, even working at this kind of scale the costs of data storage and library generation alone put the cost of a whole genome at closer to $2000. Meanwhile, back onsite, Carl and Eleanor were deep in the workshops, learning how this tidal wave of information can be put to good use!

Getting all that data to the clinic

Carl Smith

While Liz was out at the Broad Institute, it was seminar heaven here at the Festival grounds. ‘Translating NGS Data Into The Clinic’ was one of the morning’s most popular sessions. Danielle Greenawalt (Bristol-Myers Squibb), Long Phi Le (Massachusetts General Hospital), and Carl Barrett (AstraZeneca), did a fantastic job presenting the reality behind getting NGS into the clinic. While the technology is there, the centralised standards are not. It was also startling to hear just how difficult it is to get a diagnostic approved. We hear a lot about how inexpensive NGS is these days, but it is still prohibitively expensive for many hospitals. At the moment, it’s really only the big hospitals who can afford it (and the teams you need to make it all work!).

There is still a lot of figuring out to be done. Sequencing will continue to get cheaper. When that barrier to entry drops again, we need to have standards in place and a good idea of how NGS should work efficiently in the clinic. If that happens, it will make widespread adoption a much more realistic possibility.

Actionable information for patients and their physicians

Eleanor Rogers

Xuan Shirley Li, Chief Scientific Officer at Molecular Match, started off the workshop by saying that we still had a long way to go to achieve the cancer moonshoot laid out by Vice President Joe Biden. Although around 300 thousand genomes and exomes of Americans have been sequenced, that still only makes up less than 0.1% of the population.

James Walsh, MD Anderson Cancer Center, was up next. He started his career at Genentech, and now works at MD Anderson Cancer Center on lung cancer. Along with some amusing slides on God’s disapproval of the annoying hackers discovering the genome, he covered the great begin done around the EGFR gene mutation. There is still resistance, both against the treatment due to mutations, as well as in the clinic because of the high number of molecular profile subsets of the variant.

Jack Whelan, a research and patient advocate, took the stand and brought the audience back down to Earth as he described what it was like living a rare diagnosis. “It’s like the feeling you get on a roller coaster”, he said. He gave great positive vibes as he described the importance he placed on laughter as the best medicine, and how involving patients in clinical trials is just as importance as the research. ‘Patient-centric’ can be just a buzz word for some bio-pharma, the importance should be placed on compassion.

Finally, Corrie Painter, Associate Director of Operations and Scientific Outreach at the Broad Institute, explored the importance of support from fellow patients, such as finding a Facebook support group on Angiosarcoma, a rare blood vessel tumour with effects only 21 people in the world every year. The knowledge that people had in that group went far beyond anything else Corrie could find and highlighted the importance of the engaged patient. If they could crowd source photos of themselves for the Facebook group, why couldn’t they crowd source their tumours?

There were also some great questions raised, such as the need to improve IT as part of healthcare strategy, with Jack Whelan making the point that his car dealership had better patient, or customer, data than hospitals! All round a great sharing of ideas and for someone coming to patient data fairly new, it was eye-opening to see just how involved some patients are prepared to get.

And finally…

Today also saw the inaugural Drug Development Leaders Meeting at the Festival. Senior representatives from Regeneron, Takeda, Merck, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Teva, and Roche, met to discuss a range of topics: patient access and clinical trials, using real world data, companion diagnostics, collaborations, and the Precision Medicine Initiative.

More on these topics
Clinical genomics
Data
Festival of Genomics

More on these topics

Houston’s MolecularMatch Expands Cancer Patient Treatment Service

by

Houston’s MolecularMatch Expands Cancer Patient Treatment Service

Houston, TX – TMC Innovation – Texas Medical Center (April 25, 2016) –

Xconomy Texas — 

Houston — Since MolecularMatch launched its web-based service to connect patients to clinical trials two years ago, the startup has received more than 250,000 searches by people seeking cancer treatment.

“We don’t know if each of those people successfully ended up in a clinical trial,” says CEO Kevin Coker, citing privacy rules that patients agree to once they participate in trials.

That insight about the difficulty in tracking patients all the way through a clinical trial has been part of the growth process for the Houston-based health IT firm, he says. So, MolecularMatch spent time to develop complementary products to the clinical trial matching service.

“Clinical trial matching is an important part of what we do, but we’ve moved from a website and turned it into a platform of services,” he says. “The website ties all of these products together.”

MolecularMatch started two years ago out of technology licensed from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The idea was to use software to seek out and aggregate raw clinical trial information from public sources, such as clinicaltrials.gov, to create an online database that patients with certain cancer mutations or other characteristics can use to find trials that might best treat them. Coker has called it a Google search combined with Match.com.

Finding ways to more effectively match patients with clinical trials and boost trial participation is a big challenge right now in the life sciences industry, and MolecularMatch isn’t the only one trying to use software to ease the process.

MolecularMatch is trying to tackle the problem from a different angle, with new products geared toward doctors and researchers.

Coker tells me the company has expanded into services that are separate, but related, to its clinical trial search software for patients, in an attempt to offer clinicians and patients a one-stop place to find the most innovative treatments. “Cancer care has changed so much that physicians can’t keep up with what drugs might work for a patient,” Coker says. “We are taking the latest research, the published data, and incorporate that into our software. We’re able to give the docs the most accurate drug or best clinical trial recommendations.”

MolecularMatch now offers three services, in addition to its clinical trials-matching website. MM Data is designed to work with hospitals’ existing software and electronic medical records systems. “We plug directly into their workflow systems and we receive information about the patient: the type of cancer they have, genetic mutations in that patient’s cancer,” he says. “We process that in our software for drugs that might be of potential benefit for that patient.”

The next product, MM Lab, is a software system that incorporates the data product above, he says. But this product is being targeted toward labs like Foundation Medicine—facilities where genetic testing is done outside of the hospital setting. “These labs have sequencers and other scientists and people who run the lab, but the interpretation [of the genetic tests is] very, very difficult,” Coker says. “That’s the friction point we address.”

Lastly, MolecularMatch has developed what Coker calls a portal through which oncologists can receive genetic testing reports that have been “interpreted” by the company’s software in a HIPAA-compliant way, called MM Engage.

One of the company’s customers is Biodesix, a Boulder, CO-based private lab that is using both MM Lab and MM Engage. “Since the lab is outside of the hospital system, the ways that they can get the information back to the docs are very crude,” Coker says. That’s where MolecularMatch’s software comes in.

As the company rolls out these services, Coker says the company also plans to pursue a Series B round this summer of $10 million. The company has so far raised close to $4 million from investors such as Houston’s Goose Society.

MolecularMatch still has to prove the value of its new offerings, but it’s getting that opportunity. The company has started 17 pilot projects with hospitals and is in talks with half a dozen Chinese facilities, Coker says. He adds that there are a couple of partnerships in the works that should be announced in the next few weeks. “We’re finding there is a huge need for this service,” he says.

Angela Shah is the editor of Xconomy Texas. She can be reached at ashah@xconomy.com or (214) 793-5763.