By Joe Boomgaard | MSS
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Intervention Insights CEO Jerry Callahan is helping to commercialize technology developed at Van Andel Research Institute that will lead to more personalized treatment options for cancer patients. PHOTO: ADAM BIRD

GRAND RAPIDS — Oncologists have very little time to decide on the best path of treatment for cancer patients, but a new bioinformatics company using intellectual property developed at Van Andel Institute aims to put the best data quickly at their fingertips.

In an era when community oncologists are experiencing a 22-percent increase in the number of patients they see, Intervention Insights LLC believes it has a tool that would help oncologists make informed, personalized treatment decisions for those patients, said Jerry Callahan, the CEO for the company and director of business development at VAI.

Callahan said the 50th percentile of oncologists saw 5,136 cancer patients in a year, which leaves them with about a 10-minute window to decide on a course of treatment. Intervention Insights offers an information service, OncInsights, that helps inform oncologists’ choices.

Intervention Insights licenses the XenoBase software system developed by researchers at Van Andel Research Institute and used to explore the molecular basis of disease. The company formed in 2009 and began providing its first services in June 2010.

To date, Callahan has raised over $2 million in pre-seed, seed and A round financing, all from local investors. The startup is seeking B round funding and is in meetings with two large Midwest venture capital funds, with the goal to raise another $5 million. The company employs about 11 full-time people.

Currently, about 125 oncologists participate with the program, and they see about 18,000-20,000 patients annually, Callahan said. The company goal is to enroll 10 major oncology groups around the country, and it’s currently about halfway there.

“The biggest challenge right now is getting the payers and the community oncologists to agree on a framework that the payers pay and the oncologists receive it,” Callahan told Main Street Strategies.

The Edward Lowe Foundation named Intervention Insights to its Michigan 50 Companies To Watch in 2011.

OncInsights isn’t a service that should be used for every patient, but it’s particularly useful for those who don’t respond to the first line of treatment.

In short, once a cancer is located and a biopsy has been ordered, an oncologist can ask a patient if he or she wants to enroll in OncInsights and send a portion of the excess tissue to a specialized CLIA laboratory, where scientists do a molecular profile of the tumor. That gives scientists the full genome of the tumor, information that they can then load into the software to run through a series of comparisons to see what makes the tumor work.

Armed with the data, the system also compares the tumor to the world of drug knowledge to identify drugs that work in that molecular context. The system then searches the body of published scientific research to see if the drug has been used for that particular disease in the past. It also ranks how well the drugs and the tumor match.

Callahan said the location of a tumor is irrelevant to the functioning of its molecules. In some cases, a drug designed to treat breast cancer might be the best bet in tackling someone’s colorectal cancer if the drug targets the molecular function of the person’s cancer.

But Medicare will only consider paying for a FDA-approved drug in an off-label instance when there have been at least two cases of it being tested in Phase 2 research and written up in at least two journals — hence OncInsights emphasis on providing doctors with that research information.

“We’re all different people, and our cancers are different. The molecular underpinnings that make cancer unique to you are targeted by drugs that go after that specific action. Oncologists can go after what’s going on in your tumor and pick drugs that make sense for your cancer,” Callahan said.

The company chose community-based oncologists because those linked with research institutions already have access to novel treatments and sophisticated data modeling. According to Callahan, 80 percent of cancer patients never have access to clinical trials and could benefit from this information service.

While Intervention Insights is still in its early days, Callahan sees potential in using this kind of information to help shorten the cycle of diagnosis and treatment — and ultimately get people their lives back. He tells oncologists that the service will do nothing but improve as the research advances.

“I’m betting on the collective knowledge of science and clinicians publishing and their firsthand look at the disease rather than betting on one guy. The services we’re reporting to you today are better than they were six months ago, but not as good as they will be six months from today,” he said. mss