The Covid-19 pandemic has taken over 3.4 million lives worldwide since 2020. Every single one of these deaths is a tragedy. By comparison, each year around three times as many people will die from cancer. It is a disease that affects everyone regardless of nationality, but not everyone has access to the same quality of treatments. Early detection is by far the biggest lever in reducing global cancer deaths and will require affordable new techniques to rapidly diagnose early stage cancer. That’s why we’re so excited to join the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community and support its mission of improving global health through technological innovation.
The Global Innovators program is an invitation-only group of “the world’s most promising start-ups and scale-ups that are at the forefront of technological and business model innovation” and address challenges relevant to the World Economic Forum’s core platforms. Only about 100 such companies around the world across all sectors are part of this program, such as Color Health, Joby Aviation and Mammoth Biosciences. Earli will contribute our expertise in precision medicine and oncology to support the Forum’s Shaping the Future of Health and Healthcare platform, which aims to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to the highest standards of medicine.
“Earli works on a highly innovative early cancer localization technology, and we are very keen to explore how such technologies can be developed and deployed in ways that help cancer patients around the world. We are excited to welcome Earli as a Global Innovator to the World Economic Forum’s community and draw from their insights to inform the broader goals of access to appropriate cancer treatments,” says Dr. Genya Dana, Head of Health and Healthcare at the World Economic Forum.
Early detection and treatment has been shown to dramatically reduce mortality rates in the most deadly forms of cancer. The five-year survival rate in patients with breast cancer, which claims 685,000 lives per year, is up to four times higher if the cancer is detected during Stage I versus Stage IV. In liver cancer, one of the most deadly forms of cancer, it is up to 16 times higher.
But most diagnostic techniques require access to expensive equipment typically only found in major oncology institutions and these techniques are still limited in their ability to detect small clusters of early-stage cancer cells. By the time a tumor can be detected with current techniques, the cells may have mutated several times or spread to other areas of the body. This makes the cancer harder to treat and decreases the patient’s chance of survival.
Earli’s Synthetic Biopsy technology is a new path toward reliable and inexpensive early stage diagnostics. We enlist the body’s own cellular machinery to force cancer cells to reveal their exact location so they can be treated with precision therapeutics. Our future vision is to make early cancer detection as simple as taking a pill and analyzing a urine sample so that it can be accessible to everyone. We’re proud our work will support the World Economic Forum in its efforts to raise the quality of global healthcare and transform cancer from one of the biggest killers into a benign experience.
