Moneyball Medicine

Pek Lum, co-founder, and CEO of Auransa believes that a lot fewer drugs would fail in Phase 2 clinical trials if they were tested on patients predisposed to respond. The problem is finding the sub-populations of likely high-responders in advance and matching them up with promising drug compounds. That’s Auransa's specialty.The Palo Alto, CA-based drug discovery startup, formerly known as Capella Biosciences, has a pipeline of novel compounds for treating cancer and other conditions identified through machine learning analysis of genomic data and other kinds of data. It’s closest to the clinical trial stage with a gene expression modulator for liver cancer (AU-409) and is also working on drugs for prostate cancer and for protecting the heart against chemotherapy drugs. The company says it discovered AU-409 as part of a broad evaluation of data sets on a range of close to 30 diseases. The company’s discovery process uses a platform called the SMarTR Engine that uses hypothesis-free machine learning to identify