Syapse Wins Startup Showcase at Strata Rx

Start-up, Syapse, says that their cloud-based platform is ready to take healthcare past the fax machine era (which they say it’s stuck in now) into a new age, with a system that helps healthcare professionals share and utilize individual patient data. The company won top honors this past week in the Strata Rx Startup Showcase.

Medicine is moving in a decidedly new direction, explained Jonathan Hirsch, president of Syapse, during his Startup Showcase presentation. “Medicine is moving from a phenotypic descriptive observational science to a discipline that is driven by data,” Hirsch explained, saying that the data is being collected into a “multi-omics” profile which includes an alphabet soup of patient data. “Every patient will be genotyped at birth – they will have their transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, et cetera, measured on an ongoing basis as warranted, and as time goes on.”

However, says Hirsch, all this data is incredibly difficult to utilize and share under the current modus operandi in the healthcare system. “The fax machine still remains the API for healthcare,” laments Hirsch. “So when the physician receives a test report, most of the time they are receiving a piece of paper that they look at – and when you go to your typical oncologist’s office, they have 20 pieces of paper scattered all over their desk, and this is how they’re integrating data.”

Aiming at changing this paradigm, Hirsch’s company, Syapse, has developed a platform that contains an array of applications aimed at enabling clinical omics (made up of all the data profiles mentioned previously) using mobile devices on either iOS or Android platforms.

The platform, says Hirsch, is based on semantic computing principles, some of which Syapse has pioneered, enabling flexibility and configurability to accommodate any data type. “We can capture anything from omics profiles, to phenotypical information, no matter what silo it’s in,” says Hirsch. “All of this [data] is sucked into our platform and delivered directly to the physician, or is generated by the laboratory.”

The company, says Hirsch, is currently in the process of expanding their tools to the hospital level with select cancer centers bringing the Syapse platform online. Through the Syapse application, teams of health care professionals, from physicians and physician leaders, to tumor boards, and even the patient will have access to a cocktail of data and collaborate on patient outcomes.

Earlier this year the startup, which spun out of Stanford University, took in a $3 million dollar round of Series A financing from The Social+Capital Partnership, a venture fund launched by former Facebooker, Chamath Palihapitiya.

While the system sounds promising, Syapse has its challenges, explained Hirsch noting that in order to maximize the usefulness of their system, there needs to be free and open sharing of the interpretation of the genome.

“We are committed to the open sharing of the genetic interpretation,” said Hirsch. “As part of this, we are working with the Genetic Alliance and other nonprofits on the Free the Data initiative.” Hirsch said that the initiative aims to crowdsource the interpretation of the breast cancer variance.

“After we’re done with breast cancer, we’re going to move on to the rest of the cancer genome,” he said.

Related items:

Big Data Aiming to Lower Big Prescription Bills 

Healthcare Alliances Moving the Ball on Big Data 

Reducing Suicide Rates with Predictive Analytics