An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Focus on what you have control over — As an innovator, once your innovation grows it is essential to maintain clarity and focus over the most valuable tasks that will lead to company growth and trust the progress happening in other areas of the company. Be conscious of the fact that in a company ecosystem there is no one person that can maintain total control over everything.
As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World” I had the pleasure of interviewing Amir Trablesi.
Amir Trablesi is the CEO and co-founder of Genoox, the genomics analysis company on a mission to make clinical genetic data more accessible and actionable at the point of care.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you please tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
As long as I’ve known myself, I’ve loved understanding data and utilizing the data to create products that create an impact. Prior to Genoox, my passion for data was applied by not only building products, but by mining data that provided insights to different areas such as, military intelligence and cyber security.
At some point, I was looking for something bigger to maintain my passion for data that would also still create an impact. And after some time of searching for what my next venture would be, I sat down for drinks with my close friend, Moshe Einhorn, who at the time was working on a project as a part of his academic work in computational biology. When he told me about the project, which was my light bulb moment, I knew exactly what I would be doing next. I then quickly convinced Moshe to drop his academic work and become my partner in founding Genoox.
Can you please share with us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
That’s hard, I can’t choose just one, so I’ll share two. When we started building Genoox I wanted to learn as much as possible about what was stopping genetic insights from becoming actionable and why this was so important to the platform’s users. Typically those users are doctors who tend to have very busy schedules, so finding someone to meet with regularly to share their experiences and to discover the industry pain points was difficult. Luckily I was able to find an amazing doctor who really understood my mission. She was passionate about her patients and worked day and night to come up with ideas to improve diagnosis rates using genomic data. At a certain point, I noticed she had been missing work more and more often. Her colleague let me know over the past few months, she had been fighting cancer herself, while still coming into work and meeting with me. After a few weeks, she passed away and I went to her “shiva” (Jewish period of mourning). She was an orthodox Jewish woman and apparently, her family didn’t know much about what she did. They knew she was a doctor but didn’t know how many lives she saved and what a hero she was. I was sitting there and couldn’t stop talking about how many patients she saved and the devotion she had for her work. It was amazing to be able to share her passion for her work having worked with her. Another story I have is from an interesting patient case, where a set of parents had a child with an undiagnosed disease. As they were pregnant with a second child, they grew concerned the newborn would carry the same disease. Their doctor came to us and asked us to analyze their genetic data. It was a hard case, but due to the community data, we were able to find similar cases, outside of the known-public data realm, which revealed a marker that might explain the child’s symptoms and disease, and allow us to find whether the new baby carries the same mutation or not. Unfortunately, the baby shared the same marker as their child. But the more interesting information we found is that the parents were related and they were not aware of it. While this finding was a coincidence they understood the diagnoses of their oldest child further and were able to approach companies with available treatments as well as make a knowledgeable, conscious decision to terminate the pregnancy and understand the steps they will have to do, to plan for the future in a new pregnancy.
Which principles or philosophies have guided your life? Your career?
I believe in modesty and transparency. It might sound like a cliché you hear after spending time at a “new age retreat” or like a self-undermining joke but I’ve thought about this a lot. Even though modesty and transparency aren’t always apparent in business, I find that adhering to those standards allows me to get the most out of my interactions with people. Those principles are also a part of the DNA of Genoox and why our users love working with us.
Ok thank you for that. Let’s now move to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell us about your “Big Idea That Might Change The World”?
Our idea is quite simple if you think about it. The era of cheap rapid genome sequencing has revolutionized healthcare in many ways. When Steve Jobs sequenced his tumor in order to try and find relevant therapy he had to pay more than $100K and only a few therapies were available. Today, sequencing a tumor costs less than $500 and according to PMC, nearly 50% of therapies that were approved by the FDA for cancer in recent years were targeted to genetic markers and this number is growing as we see clinical trials that target specific markers.
However, while the cost of sequencing has decreased dramatically, our understanding of the relationship between a specific marker to a therapy or a symptom is limited to what we already know and what has been studied and researched. Beyond that, data remains unactionable. Real-life patient cases reveal new markers daily and thus expanding the realm of future drug development, and generally better patient care.
The most frustrating part about this is what I call the “actionability of the non-actionable patient cases.” And what I mean by this is, that usually if a patient’s genome data has a mutation that is unknown, meaning it has no current evidence in the public domain, the case is classified as undiagnosed and closed. As a single case, it is indeed impossible to tell something about the case if there is no current knowledge. However, if we had other patients’ cases that are similar to this that are also left undiagnosed then perhaps together if we compare all these cases together and work in collaboration, then we can find answers that otherwise would have been left unknown. Here we get to what we actually do and the guiding principle here is that ‘data is more valuable when shared’ which is true in many other cases and especially in genomics.
We have created a community of genetic experts that can upload their patients’ genetic cases and get immediate access to all evidence that exists today in the public domain, if there is such. In addition, as they upload the cases, we apply a learning system that learns from all cases that were uploaded and creates powerful knowledge for new markers that don’t have evidence or knowledge, resulting from our curated proprietary community’s data. Together, by contributing their own observations and using the power of the community we can help make the unknown known.
How do you think this will change the world?
Genetics is becoming an incredibly crucial component to patient care. It is so personal and can have tremendous effects on every part of a person’s life. Genetics has the power to identify defects in fetuses and newborns and assess risks for inherited diseases. Genetics can also assist the understanding of proper drug prescriptions and dosage to match specific patient DNA and help profile cancer tumors, by monitoring them and selecting the right therapy or clinical trial for the patients. Genetics can even help post mortem via molecular autopsy to identify cause of death.
At Genoox we believe genomics acts as a “crystal ball” for doctors to utilize and recommend treatments. We believe that access to our individual genomic data on our medical record is imperative so that at any age, or any stage of life a doctor can look at your medical file and guide you to the most appropriate treatment and diagnosis that matches not only your symptoms or age but also your DNA.
The impact of genomics on patient journeys and how genomics can change and improve patient care.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this idea that people should think more deeply about?
There is a movie called Gattaca that actually illustrates a dystopia using genomics in a negative way, even showing couples “selecting” each other based on their genetics.
Of course, there are ways people can abuse this technology and use it inappropriately, starting from selecting how their baby will look like or deciding whether they will have risks for diseases or not. Commercial companies can also use this genetic data illegally to predict our risks and discriminate against people based on this.
Despite these risks, I still believe that genomics will revolutionize how we provide care for patients and make medicine more effective.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this idea? Can you tell us that story?
I mentioned earlier the difference in price for modern genetic sequencing. What once cost thousands of dollars is now a fraction of the price. That was the tipping point for me.
In the past, it was not effective to sequence more than very specific genes due to cost and also due to the fact we only had knowledge of few definitive genes and their roles. As the price continued to drop and genetic sequencing became more affordable and accessible, there was still a lot of unknown data and medical experts were left to continue making knowledgeable guesses. As we saw more and more previously unknown cases pop up, we understood that only together, by sharing the data, we can make an impact.
What do you need to lead this idea to widespread adoption?
For this idea to become mainstream we will need to see a continuous decline in cost and standardization in sequencing technology. I do believe that we will see, over the next 2 years, more and more technologies that will make genomic sequencing easier and faster.
The most significant change we need is more healthcare organizations adopting genomic data as part of their patient care and for that, we need more medical insurers to reimburse genomics. We see more and more studies demonstrating the value of genomics in patient care and how it can help assess risk and guide therapy. For example, Warfarin, a commonly used blood thinner when taken by patients with specific genetic markers, can lead to abnormal metabolism leading to a wide range of biological activity which has the potential to conclude to a hemorrhage or stroke.
Pharmacogenomics have helped identify patients at risk and were able to provide guided dosing — or enabled clinicians to choose another drug. We see the move towards including genomic profiling as part of insurer offering, but we need to see more tests being covered. Even more than that we hope that insurers will understand the value of storing and managing genomic data for future use as our DNA is not changing, and the idea of storing the genetic data once to be able to access the information at any time for clinical reasons is not science fiction anymore.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Decide fast and fix later — This is a lesson any entrepreneur should learn. I had many decisions I needed to make at the beginning of my career and sometimes I spent too much time deciding whether option A or option B is better for the company while they were completely tactical decisions. The best thing to do is to decide and fix afterward if we were wrong.
- Build a culture for your company from day 1 — At Genoox we started to build our company culture from the very beginning as we started to build our team. This was extremely helpful and aided us in continuing to grow and develop. Company culture helps to define the DNA of the company, furthermore defining the company values, and allows you to bring in people who share the same values with you, to create not only a strong team but also, a team bonded together with a greater purpose and mission.
- Take a deep breath. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Things will take time, you must stick to your plan — It might be a cliché but it’s so true. As both myself and my partner were coming from a cyber security background, and we had no experience in healthcare, most of the investors we met wanted us to do something related to security or were concerned about lack of experience in the field of genomics. So, it took us time to raise the funds we needed to reach our milestones. But with a lot of discipline, we were able to reach those milestones, which validated our assumptions and we were able to work with investors that see the benefits of including “outsiders” in the healthcare market and why it creates different thinking and brings a unique angle to the market.
- Know your strengths and weaknesses — Knowing your strengths and weaknesses will help you to build a collaborative team. I learned the hard way that bringing in people who focus on skills you’ve already mastered doesn’t complement what your company needs and has the potential to even slow the company down.
- Focus on what you have control over — As an innovator, once your innovation grows it is essential to maintain clarity and focus over the most valuable tasks that will lead to company growth and trust the progress happening in other areas of the company. Be conscious of the fact that in a company ecosystem there is no one person that can maintain total control over everything.
Can you share with our readers what you think are the most important “success habits” or “success mindsets”?
I believe that there are many habits that are personal and might vary between each one of us as we might define success differently. I think that discipline is required as you go through this journey. It helps with persistence and focuses on what needs to be done, even for the not-fun parts and the challenges that will come.
Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
Genoox harnesses the power of its community to enable actionable insights from the largest real-time real-life genomic database serving professionals at the point of care. Genoox’s cloud-based AI platform, Franklin, connects clinicians, genetic counselors and healthcare organizations while enabling platform users to make impactful discoveries using the most advanced genomic tools and applications. Genoox is used by over 1,700 health organizations, hospitals and medical facilities in 44 markets across the globe.
The current system is broken because:
- Accessing, collecting and providing the “right and most actionable” knowledge is challenging
- Turning sequencing data into knowledge is a hard process both logistically and computationally
- Clinicians lack tools to help them make informed genetic decisions for their patients
- Patients don’t understand what to do with their genetic data and how it can help them
We believe we can fix genomics and make it actionable with Genoox.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amir-trabelsi-8b74791/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/genoox/
https://www.facebook.com/genoox
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Genoox: Amir Trablesi’s Big Idea That May Change The World In The Next Few Years was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
