One nonprofit’s ambitious new innovation for rare blood cancer patients
Good afternoon, readers.
Longtime readers are likely familiar with the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF), the largest nonprofit group for patients who have the rare blood cancer. On Tuesday, the group launched an ambitious new initiative called “CureCloud” into which founder Kathy Giusti gave Fortune a first look.
Giusti’s organization has been at this work for well over two decades and her philosophy—guided by experiences as a pharmaceutical executive, a multiple myeloma patient herself, and now a nonprofit leader—is simple: You need to provide the patients true value and break down the walls of academia to spur cancer drug development.
She describes CureCloud as a “crescendo of disruption.”
“With our support, anyone can now get sequenced,” Giusti tells me. “It doesn’t matter what your economic status is, we will sequence you if you raise your hand.”
The concept is (and you can read much more about it in my story from this morning) a technician can come into a patient’s home, conduct a blood test that will allow for that person’s genomic sequencing, and then get personalized information about which treatments and medical choices will work best for them. That can simultaneously inform patients while spurring new drug development in a democratized process.
It sounds like services such as 23andMe and Ancestry. But there’s a key difference. This is all free.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
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@the_sy_guy
