Empowered Patient Podcast

Andria Parks, Head of Commercial Operations at First Ascent Biomedical, highlights the value of using a biopsy to grow cancer cells in a lab to determine which drugs are most likely to be effective against a specific cancer. This functional medicine approach combines lab data, genomic data, and AI to produce a report that identifies which drugs might work and which are unlikely to be effective for that individual patient. This perspective is particularly effective for rare cancers, which often lack established treatment guidelines.  Andria explains, "First Ascent Biomedical is a functional precision medicine company. And what that means is we've put together three very unique and advanced technologies to produce something very specific, and I'll explain what that means. What we do is we take a fresh biopsy from a patient, and we will grow those cells in our lab in a medium very similar to the human body. We will test or validate more than 150 drugs and drug combinations on those cells to see what works on tho