Developing successful cancer treatments remains challenging, with high failure rates. Cosmology may hold the answer.
Founded by a biomedical engineer, a computational physicist and a medical oncologist, Concr uses established computational frameworks from astrophysics to enable learning between disparate and messy oncology data to accurately model cancer biology.
This allows scientists to predict therapeutic response for individual patients, simulate clinical trials and generate biomarker hypotheses, thereby de-risking drug development and improving patient outcomes.
In July 2024, the first patients were recruited into Concr’s observational trial of their FarrSight®-Twin technology for outcome prediction in breast cancer.
“Our vision is to ensure precision oncology reaches the widest population, and that the widest population reaches precision oncology.”
Matt continues, “This requires us to efficiently integrate diverse data modalities (solve data), to identify predictive biomarkers of treatment response (enabling precision diagnostics), that are generalisable to the widest patient cohorts (for all).”
Astrophysics meets oncology – changing the story of cancer
Oncology therapeutic development continues to face high failure rates, causing substantial R&D costs with limited improvements to patient benefit and survival. However, there is a spark of hope in the distance, and cosmology may hold the answer.
Founded by biomedical engineer Matt Foster, computational physicist Dr Matthew Griffiths and medical oncologist Dr Uzma Asghar, Concr uses established computational frameworks from astrophysics to enable learning between disparate and messy oncology data to accurately model cancer biology. This allows scientists to confidently predict therapeutic response, simulate clinical trials and generate biomarker hypotheses, thereby de-risking drug development and improving patient outcomes.
Our Ventures team co-led a £1.94 million seed round in 2023 alongside existing investor R42 Group, as well as welcoming new investors – Oncology Ventures, SyndicateRoom, Debiopharm and Jo Pisani from Cambridge Angels. Since then, Concr promoted Dr Irina Babina to CEO, and has pre-published a paper validating its novel approach across cancer types and treatment complexities.
Image Credits: Concr
