Empowered Patient Podcast

Tuvik Beker, CEO of Pangea Biomed, is looking for more accurate biomarkers for oncology to determine better who might benefit from a specific drug. Their ENLIGHT platform is a pan-cancer, pan-treatment response predictor and can be used to find the best patient populations to give a new drug. They are also working with bio-pharma companies on improving the identification of novel targets through better biomarkers, better patient stratification, and combination therapy optimization. Tuvik elaborates, "Rather than looking at the genome and looking for abnormalities in gene coding, those rare fusions, or actionable mutations, what Pangea is doing is looking at the way genes are activated in the tumor." "And this turns out to be a much, much more common abnormality in cancer tumor cells. So almost any tumor cell that you would examine, you would find hundreds and even thousands of genes that are normally encoded. So they have no mutations, they are wild-type genes, and yet they are abnormally expressed in the tum