The Earli Story
Dr. Sam Gambhir’s wife Aruna had developed breast cancer and survived it. Then his only 15-year-old son Milan developed brain cancer. Meanwhile Sam was urgently searching for new ways to detect and treat cancer. As the founder of Stanford’s Canary Center of Early Cancer Detection, and head of Radiology at the Stanford Clinic, he was looking at natural cancer biomarkers in blood; they were promising but proved elusive. So, Sam flipped the problem on its head and came up with a radically new idea.
On Thanksgiving Day, Cyriac Roeding, a serial entrepreneur who had recently sold his prior startup, read Sam’s gripping story and contacted him directly. He had looked at 200 ideas to find the right next challenge on the intersection of the physical and engineering world. But he had not been as deeply touched by any other mission as by Sam’s. The two met on a Saturday morning for breakfast at a local restaurant in a 4,000 people town in Silicon Valley called Portola Valley, close to Palo Alto. It turned out, they lived three minutes from each other in the same small town and hadn’t known it.
Sam’s and Cyriac’s Saturday morning breakfast turned into a 3-hour conversation, and not long after, Cyriac found himself sitting at Sam’s house’s kitchen table every other Saturday morning for the next three months, where Sam told the entrepreneur about biology and oncology insights. They became friends. Sam shared with him his idea of turning cancer against itself, by creating genetic constructs that only turn on in cancer, and not in non-cancer cells, and then turning the cancer cell into a factory – forcing the cancer to produce any protein of choice that helps reveal, and ultimately kill itself. Cyriac was immediately fascinated and could not forget about the idea (“I tried to forget it, it didn’t work,” he says). For the next nine months, they went through hundreds of people to find the right third co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. That became Dr. David Suhy, a gene therapy and techbio startup expert with two decades of experience taking a gene therapy product all the way from inception to Phase 2 clinical trials. Earli was started in June 2018 and moved into its first lab space in South San Francisco a month later.
Since then, Earli has been assembling the world’s best team to bring the science to humans as soon as possible and fulfill Sam’s deep purpose. To that end, Earli spent five years to develop a platform that can answer the elusive core question in oncology “Is it cancer? Y/N” and if yes, produce an encoded protein of choice. Earli acts on the intersection of biology, engineering and software. The diagnostic imaging and immune and radioligand therapy applications are now built on top.
In July 2020, Sam himself sadly passed away from a cancer of unknown primary, one day after he received the Stanford Dean’s Medal, the highest recognition of scientific, humanitarian and medical contributions at Stanford University. In November 2023, Aruna also passed away from her third bout with cancer. The disease brutally took away the whole family.
As a result, Earli feels an even deeper urgency to carry Sam’s and his family’s torch and turn his vision into reality. Earli’s mission is to make cancer a benign experience, by turning cancer against itself.
Dr. Sam Gambhir’s wife Aruna had developed breast cancer and survived it. Then his only 15-year-old son Milan developed brain cancer. Meanwhile Sam was urgently searching for new ways to detect and treat cancer. As the founder of Stanford’s Canary Center of Early Cancer Detection, and head of Radiology at the Stanford Clinic, he was looking at natural cancer biomarkers in blood; they were promising but proved elusive. So, Sam flipped the problem on its head and came up with a radically new idea.
On Thanksgiving Day, Cyriac Roeding, a serial entrepreneur who had recently sold his prior startup, read Sam’s gripping story and contacted him directly. He had looked at 200 ideas to find the right next challenge on the intersection of the physical and engineering world. But he had not been as deeply touched by any other mission as by Sam’s. The two met on a Saturday morning for breakfast at a local restaurant in a 4,000 people town in Silicon Valley called Portola Valley, close to Palo Alto. It turned out, they lived three minutes from each other in the same small town and hadn’t known it.
Sam’s and Cyriac’s Saturday morning breakfast turned into a 3-hour conversation, and not long after, Cyriac found himself sitting at Sam’s house’s kitchen table every other Saturday morning for the next three months, where Sam told the entrepreneur about biology and oncology insights. They became friends. Sam shared with him his idea of turning cancer against itself, by creating genetic constructs that only turn on in cancer, and not in non-cancer cells, and then turning the cancer cell into a factory – forcing the cancer to produce any protein of choice that helps reveal, and ultimately kill itself. Cyriac was immediately fascinated and could not forget about the idea (“I tried to forget it, it didn’t work,” he says). For the next nine months, they went through hundreds of people to find the right third co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. That became Dr. David Suhy, a gene therapy and techbio startup expert with two decades of experience taking a gene therapy product all the way from inception to Phase 2 clinical trials. Earli was started in June 2018 and moved into its first lab space in South San Francisco a month later.
Since then, Earli has been assembling the world’s best team to bring the science to humans as soon as possible and fulfill Sam’s deep purpose. To that end, Earli spent five years to develop a platform that can answer the elusive core question in oncology “Is it cancer? Y/N” and if yes, produce an encoded protein of choice. Earli acts on the intersection of biology, engineering and software. The diagnostic imaging and immune and radioligand therapy applications are now built on top.
In July 2020, Sam himself sadly passed away from a cancer of unknown primary, one day after he received the Stanford Dean’s Medal, the highest recognition of scientific, humanitarian and medical contributions at Stanford University. In November 2023, Aruna also passed away from her third bout with cancer. The disease brutally took away the whole family.
As a result, Earli feels an even deeper urgency to carry Sam’s and his family’s torch and turn his vision into reality.
Earli’s mission is to make cancer a benign experience, by turning cancer against itself.
