New Leases on Life
By Larry Lindner
May 2024
Since 2017, Biomakers has added more than 9,000 years to the lives of cancer patients, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Nicolás Kirchuk. Biomakers genetically maps malignant tumors so that drugs can be tailored to target their cells. Those targeted drugs keep cancer cells from multiplying, and also keep them from spreading to even more tissues in the body. It’s precision medicine at its best, preventing the assault on healthy cells that comes with chemotherapy. And it’s about to get better, particularly for Latin Americans diagnosed with cancer.
This past year, Biomakers partnered with a division of LabCorp, a firm that Kirchuk calls “the biggest player in the world” for diagnostics and clinical oncology research. As a result, cancer trials that once were limited to residents of the U.S. and Europe will now be available to people in Latin America.
“This is a point of inflection for the company,” Kirchuk says, “and also an incredible validation. Latin American cancer patients are in the game now in a way they hadn’t been.” There may be some undiscovered differences in the genomes of Latin Americans, he says, which is why it’s so important that they be included in trials.
“We are almost 10% of the world population,” Kirchuk points out. “But we have been underrepresented in clinical trials. Drug efficacy was not tested in our genotype.” Now, he says, “within two or three years, our data sets will be made from tumors representing 17 different countries in Latin America.”
"We are giving advanced cancer patients the possibility of living longer."
Curating cancer patients from different countries is critical, Kirchuk says. “Despite the fact that Latin America sounds like one region, in terms of genetic profiles, the population of each country has unique genetic diversity.”
The collaboration with LabCorp was a long time coming. “We were chasing this project for almost two years before we finally signed the contracts,” Kirchuk says. “It’s the most incredible and important milestone for our company, because now we are playing in the big leagues globally.”
In addition to inking this new deal, Kirchuck says, “we have redefined the identity of the company this year. We used to say we were a hybrid company — diagnostics and data. Now we say we are 100% a data company.
“We are still doing diagnostics,” he adds, “but our transformation of oncology is data-driven. We are monetizing the genomic data in each of the four stages of drug development: drug discovery, pre-clinical, clinical, and launching the drug to the market. Getting the data together is what moves things forward.”
Kirchuk’s 85-person team shares a common goal. “Everybody’s cognizant of the impact they are directly having on patients’ lives,” he says. “What we are doing is giving advanced cancer patients the possibility of living longer.”