Back from the Brink
By Larry Lindner
April 2023
When you’re in Nicolas Kirchuk’s line of work, the tales are plentiful. “In a small province in Argentina, a 45-year-old guy was lying on a hospital bed about to die,” recalls the Co-Founder and CEO of Biomakers. “The cancer had spread throughout his body. He had two children. We extracted tumor DNA directly from his blood and did a liquid biopsy, finding a specific mutation in a cancer gene. That meant his oncologist could give him a drug for that particular mutation. He’s now working. He’s living. He’s watching his children grow.”
This is just one example of someone that Biomakers was able to bring back from the brink by genetically mapping their metastasized tumor. That enabled doctors to administer a custom drug that targeted his cancer cells with incredible precision and, in effect, pushed back his disease — by years.
Biomakers is about to make history, having just inked a deal with Labcorp Drug Development, one of the most important companies in the world for clinical oncology research.
Biomakers started out helping late-stage patients in Argentina, but has since scaled its molecular testing and genetic diagnosis operation throughout Latin America. How? By partnering with pharmaceutical companies that are willing to pick up the tab for testing the DNA of malignant tumors in patients whose health insurance won’t cover the costs. It’s worth it for them, because insurance companies and public health systems will often cover the costs of the drug.
Now Biomakers is about to make history, having just inked a deal with Labcorp Drug Development, one of the most important companies in the world for clinical oncology research. “With this partnership, we’re going to be able to identify thousands of new patients in Latin America who can be matched for participation in clinical trials available elsewhere but not here,” says the Buenos Aires–based entrepreneur, who goes by Nico. It’s an important development, he notes, because the FDA usually approves new drugs for cancer patients without completing tests on Latin American patients. This innovative collaboration with Labcorp opens up numerous opportunities for Biomakers beyond Latin America.
“With cancer patients, everything is about time,” Nico says.
One challenge of working in so many different countries is that each one’s health system has its own intricacies. It takes a lot of logistics to move tumor and blood samples to Biomakers’ labs, which are currently in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. “With cancer patients, everything is about time,” Nico says. “We have to move the samples as quickly as we can.”
But the stress of working with so many countries also brings an opportunity for economic resilience. Inflation in Argentina is almost 100 percent year to year, Nico says, so if everything happened there, the financial difficulties would be enormous. “We are pretty protected,” he says.
That, in turn, allows more people to be tested — and more lives to be saved.