Roy de Souza is a successful tech entrepreneur. In 1999, he founded ZEDO and built it into a profitable business. In the words of an AWS case study from Amazon AMZN, he is a "developer of innovative technologies."
Then, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. His world changed.
“So that’s when I started getting interested in it and thinking, ‘you must find a way’, it’s trying to find a way to keep her alive,” De Souza said. “I decided I had to learn the technology, had to learn about cancer, do online courses. And to talk to the experts, they want you to know what you’re talking about, so I started learning.”
Ever since that fateful day in 2017, de Souza has been on a mission to cure metastatic cancers. His company, BreakBio Corp. focuses on abdominal cancer, including colon and rectal cancer, developing innovative personalized treatments tailored to each patient.
Sadly, his wife passed away in 2020, but de Souza remains undaunted.
“Getting to reliable cures at scale for these solid cancers is my purpose in life for now,” de Souza said. “They are difficult and so unfair, but we can beat them.”
A Personal Approach
“The problem is that the cancer cells are different in different parts of the tumor and different in different patients. So we just need many different drugs. Thanks to machine learning this can actually be done — but it needs someone to really dig in and get it done as there are always skeptics,” he said.
Leveraging his experience in cloud-based software, BreakBio explores personalized medicine. Using complex artificial intelligence software to analyze cancer cells from each patient, the company designs and manufactures a unique set of drugs for only that patient.
Although it has traditionally been difficult to design, manufacture and transport personalized drugs, with new technology, “personalization becomes easier and easier,” De Souza said. “You can do things faster and more efficiently.”
And having been honored by the American Cancer Society, de Souza knows he is on to something.
Two New Trials
BreakBio has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to start two new clinical trials in June, one with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and one with Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.
“Cancer is different in each patient. It’s not transmittable, it didn’t come from anybody else, it grew within you. And it’s just different. Until you take a biopsy and look at it, you don’t know exactly what you’re fighting. So that’s why we’re doing this,” De Souza shared.
“Colorectal cancer is one where we can move very fast through the process because it’s an unmet medical need,” he said. “But we’ll also do the difficult cancers, you know, like pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma, which are the difficult ones, and they move fast, and they have some challenges.”
De Souza says that when it comes to cancer, “you’ve got to shoot for cures.”
“We’re not shooting for little incremental results,” he said. “We’re shooting to kill all those kinds of cells in the tumor.”
TMX contributed to this story.
Featured photo courtesy of BreakBio.
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