Illustration credit: A.E. Kieren


Chuck Gershman, Co-founder, president and COO, Kuveda

With a big-data analytics platform that delivers personalized cancer treatment recommendations based on a patient’s unique molecular profile, Kuveda stands on the cusp of a paradigm shift in cancer treatment. Given the stakes, it arrives not a moment too soon.“It’s well understood that every cancer is unique and a disease of the DNA. Scientists have identified more than 1,600 oncogenes connected by more than 5,000 signaling pathways—this is millions of combinations—and they continue to identify new oncogenes and pathways at a rapid pace,” Gershman explains. “Human analysis needed to arrive at a treatment decision is beyond human cognitive capacity. It must be supplemented by big-data computer analysis. This is the disruption that Kuveda addresses.”

Kuveda is currently securing partner institutions for the platform’s eventual global launch. The Kuveda team is also working to make its tools fit seamlessly into providers’ workflows.

It’s worth noting that the Kuveda platform isn’t a stationary entity. It learns from every analysis—and as it becomes more widely used, Gershman expects it to help drive discoveries based on population analytics.

“We track patients’ disease all the way to the genomic makeup of their cancer,” he says. “We also track their treatment, progression and outcomes. The relationships our database can see, connect and extrapolate will be a key driver in the future.”