To QualisureDx, Cancer is Personal

Qualisure Diagnostics is focused on building tools that will help to personalize cancer care. It’s very easy to view a company as an inanimate entity, forgetting that the people who built it have (for their own personal reasons) been driven to create a mission and a vision. To our founders, interest and scientific curiosity represented a launch pad for our careers in oncology and cancer research. But eventually, as with almost anyone who has been on this Earth for some time, we have witnessed and experienced our own personal challenges and tragedies. As a result, we have come to appreciate and feel the frustrations resulting from the limitations of our current standards of cancer care.

Oliver Bathe, MD is a surgical oncologist and professor of surgery and oncology at the University of Calgary. His clinical practice focused on treating cancers of the liver, pancreas and gastrointestinal tract – some of the most aggressive tumor types known. There were innumerable conversations with patients and families on the pros and cons of various treatments. There were many discussions on whether a treatment may be beneficial. Some patients became friends, and then some friends became patients, and family became patients as well.

Cynthia Stretch, PhD is a cancer biologist and a bioinformatician. She takes very complex molecular data and identifies patterns that have clinical and biological meaning. The numbers she analyzes are from real people. Friends and family have become some of those numbers.

Farshad Farshidfar, MD, PhD is a computational biologist. Like Cynthia, he transforms complex sets of numbers to simple truths and novel insights. Farshad has lost family members to cancer. His experience has informed him of the limits of clinical science and the uncertainty of traditional cancer treatments.

David Bocking has a business background. He helps start-ups to realize commercialization. One day, Oliver and Farshad attended one of his courses, sharing their idea of bringing what they learned in a research lab to the clinic. He was immediately intrigued. His connection to their purpose was personal, as he too had lost loved ones to the ravages of cancer after extended periods of toxic treatment that had no benefit.

And so, while Qualisure Diagnostics is the result of more than 25 years of research and clinical experience, we cannot overemphasize that to us, Cancer is Personal.