Welcome to Talking Precision Medicine — the podcast in which we discuss the future of healthcare and health technology, and how advances in data and data science are fueling the next industrial revolution. 

 

This episode features Jason Springs, co-founder and CEO of Endpoint Health, an ascendant precision therapeutics company. Jason is a serial entrepreneur, who with the co-founders of his previous company, is building Endpoint Health to bring together under one roof the data science, diagnostics and therapeutics necessary to achieve truly personalized care.

 

Come on in and have a listen.

 

 

 

 

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Episode highlights:

 

Endpoint Health is a Precision-First™ therapeutics company that focuses on immune-mediated diseases ranging from sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome, to inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Endpoint’s vision is a world in which all patients get the best treatment possible for their unique biology and disease.

 

Springs started a healthcare company called ​​GeneWEAVE, together with Diego Rey and Leonardo Teixeira in 2007. It was based on an idea to build better diagnostics to identify patients with bacterial infections and to figure out the right therapy for those patients very quickly. Over the span of five years, GeneWAVE developed the technology as well as a medical product, and ended up being acquired and integrated into Roche. 

 

While working with Roche, the three co-funders formed an idea to start a new company based on integrating the three solutions in personalized medicine: understanding patients, guiding patients to the right therapy and developing therapy guiding tests and therapeutics. This is the premise that Endpoint Health was built on in 2018. 

 

The name Endpoint Health was deliberately chosen as a reminder that the company is not about the technology but about the end goal of generating additional units of health benefits for the patients. 

 

From a technological standpoint Endpoint Health is building all three pillars inside the company – data science, diagnostics and therapeutic development; and all three are based on the patient centric data point of view.

 

The current focus is on whole transcriptomic data from patients that are suffering from immune-mediated diseases, and utilizing Endpoint Health’s proprietary AI and machine learning platform. Immune defined subgroups of patients emerge as an output, and they usually have very distinct biological characteristics. This information is later used as a basis to develop tests and identify the right therapy.

 

“The science led us to the immune system, where heterogeneity really seems to come from. We developed our platform to pull that heterogeneity apart, and then we kept asking the question: if this problem exists here, where else do we have the immune system heavily involved in illnesses where treatments either don’t exist or they’re nowhere near as effective as any of us would like. We just kept pulling that thread and saw some very beautiful patterns continue to come up over and over again.”

 

We now see certain immune states seem to be the same across many different illnesses – they may have different clinical features, but that underlying cause seems to be similar. This is the beginning of a huge transformation in how diseases involving the immune system are treated.

 

“If we can turn the way our company operates and we hit the same scale as the top 10 pharma companies are today, to me, that means we will have fundamentally driven a change in how healthcare is practiced. Our goal is not only to change the direct patients we serve but to be an example of what the future state of healthcare should look like.”

 

This has been Talking Precision Medicine. Please share our podcast with your colleagues, leave a comment or review, and stay tuned for the next episode. Until then you can explore our TPM podcast archive and listen to interesting guests from our past conversations.

 

 

 

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