Could you give our readers a bit of your background, and how you came into this space?
I grew up as an engineer. My background and training is in computer and electrical engineering. I spent about 10 years in corporate America before starting my first company roughly 35 years ago. Since then, I've been the CEO of four different companies, all in the software, data and IT space. With Genomenon, this is the first company I’ve led in healthcare - doing work specifically around genomics and more recently real-world evidence for our pharma customers.
That path really started when I met the founder about nine years ago. The company started in 2014, and in 2016 Dr. Mark Kiel was looking for a CEO to lead the company through commercial development and capital raising. At that point, Genomenon was still pre-product - we hadn’t shipped anything yet. I remember thinking, this is going to be really hard. Going from zero to one million dollars in sales is far harder than going from 10 to 50 million dollars.
But I fell in love with the mission and what it implied - the chance to leverage my background in software and data to have a real impact on patients’ lives. Saving and improving the lives of babies born with rare diseases and helping cancer patients get properly diagnosed and making sure they’re receiving the right therapies. And doing that by providing actionable data - data clinicians and researchers can trust - was incredibly compelling.
When I think about it from a mission perspective, Genomenon is the most impactful company I’ve led in my career.
Could you give our readers an overview of Genomenon’s products, and what you're focusing on?
Genomenon started in the genomics space, with the launch of our Mastermind Genomic Intelligence Platform 8 years ago. We built a bespoke AI approach we call GLP, or “genomic language processing.” GLP finds and disambiguates the hundreds of different ways authors describe genes, variants, and genomic findings across the full text of scientific publications. That matters because the same variant can be written many different ways in the literature - and if you can’t reliably recognize all of them, you miss critical evidence.
Today, we’ve indexed more than 11 million full-text articles and over three and a half million supplemental datasets to build the world’s most comprehensive knowledgebase of published genomic data.
That knowledgebase is delivered through Mastermind as a genomic search engine. You can search for any genetic variant, and the results will surface every publication that mentions it - regardless of how the author described the variant. The simplest way I can describe it is that Mastermind is what Google would be if it went to school and earned a PhD in molecular biology. It directs users to the evidence they need to make genetic diagnoses and treatment decisions.
Over time, we evolved from simply delivering the underlying literature to delivering that data in a curated, interpretation-ready format. So instead of just showing clinicians the articles, we curate the evidence within them and present the information they need to determine whether a variant is pathogenic or benign. We also organize everything according to the clinical guidelines, so they can get to the point of interpretation very quickly. The benefit for our customers - typically clinical labs and healthcare providers - is that we cut down interpretation time, which directly affects their testing costs and their turnaround time.
As the business has grown, we’ve added a couple more products to extend that core capability. Last year, we acquired the Cancer Knowledgebase (CKB) from Jackson Labs. It’s very much in line with what we’re doing with Mastermind, but focused on somatic oncology. It helps customers understand the molecular profiles of cancer - not just for diagnosis, but also for determining what treatments may apply and which clinical trials a patient might be eligible for.
