"At first, cancer is a quiet disease. Inside the body, cells are aggressively multiplying out of control, changing everything. But on the outside, there's nothing special to see or feel. Not yet. For Guardant co-CEO Helmy Eltoukhy, that invisibility looked like an engineering challenge. What if cancer could be detected early - through blood tests - before you even knew it was there?"
"He took a job at Illumina, working to make genome sequencing cheaper - cutting the cost of a once-unthinkable endeavor from billions to around $1,000. It was a lesson in how Moore's Law - technology getting exponentially faster and cheaper - could transform biology, too. And so, for the past 13 years, he's been chasing what he calls a holy grail for early disease detection: a blood test any doctor might whip out at an annual physical, to screen for all kinds of cancer."
Helmy Eltoukhy envisioned using engineering principles to detect cancer when it is still invisible, by finding cancer DNA fragments in blood. Training as an electrical engineer and working at Illumina taught him how falling costs and exponential technology growth could reshape biology. He and AmirAli Talasaz developed liquid biopsies to detect and guide treatment decisions. Guardant has secured FDA approval for colon cancer screening and is pursuing pre-cancer detection, organ-health indicators, and tests for other diseases. Significant technical, clinical, and commercial challenges remain, and the company’s path to sustained profitability is uncertain.
Read at Business Insider
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