One of the many inefficiencies of the pharmaceutical industry is that drugs are often approved for market based upon far from ideal test results.  Because each of us is an individual, it’s quite common for many drugs to have little impact upon our condition, with some even having negative side effects.

Whilst the age of personalized medicine was promised when things like the human genome was first mapped, after 15 years we don’t seem to be any nearer to that heady point.

That isn’t to say companies aren’t working hard to improve things though.  One such company are Notable Labs, who are a start-up that aim to provide more personalized treatment to brain cancer patients.

They take a sample of the tumor and find the best drug combination for it having performed a number of tests on it to determine the most effective treatments.

As with so many companies, Notable Labs was founded to try and solve the pain experienced by founder Matt De Silva, whose father was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme a few years ago.

How it works

The process is relatively straightforward.  The company obtains a sample of the patient’s tumor, which it then runs through it’s customized machinery to test thousands of different drug combinations in a bid to find the most effective means of treating it.

The company utilizes the predictive analytics of a company called Atomwise to speed up the process still further, before hopefully returning a customized and effective treatment to the patient.

The recommendation is then evaluated by the doctor of each patient, before being tried out (or not).  Given that all of the available treatments in their database have been approved for tumor treatment, the hope is that they won’t run into too many problems.

It’s a nice way of bringing the promise of personalized medicine one step closer to the mainstream.