Cancer care lives beyond oncology centers.
Also on the upswing: local startups, businesses and partnerships between healthcare providers and firms.
There’s Mission Hospital’s work with new-to-OC OncoCyte Corp., expected to help show how forms of lung cancer will respond to postoperative chemotherapy.
Others include:
• DocBot in Irvine, which wants to use artificial intelligence to diagnose colon cancer faster and without a biopsy. Founder Andrew Ninh was named a Business Journal Innovator of the Year award in 2019.
• Genomic Testing Cooperative, also in Irvine and trying out AI for detection. CEO Dr. Maher Albitar focuses on the need for “in-depth molecular profiling” in detecting blood cancers.
• Amberstone Biosciences and Velox Biosystems, both co-founded by UCI Professor Weian Zhao, both incubating at UCI Beall Applied Innovation, and both with work at the cellular level that includes diagnosing and treating cancer.
A big splash recently was $86 million raised last year by Irvine’s Laboratory for Advanced Medicine, which uses AI to ID early stages of specific cancers; it’s taken in $120 million total over five years. In November, it named Ken Chahine to lead the company.
LAM founder Dr. Shu Li, a serial OC entrepreneur, has said his “next goal is to save lives” via new medical approaches.
—A. Leigh Corbett
