'Our Current Development Work Is Focussed To Oncology'

Taher Abbasi, CEO and Co-Founder, Cellworks, shares with Prathiba Raju, how precision medicine is gaining momentum in healthcare and how simulation technology is able to identify right treatment for a patient and identify right patient for a clinical trial

- Prathiba Raju

From a background of semiconductor business in the automation engineering business to healthcare, how and why was the transformation?

Automation technologies and methodologies enables semiconductor business to shorten product development time, handle higher product complexity and achieve success rates of over 98 per cent. Computer simulation was one of the enabling technologies. In healthcare, the drug development cycle is 10 years, drug approval success rate is less than 8 per cent and response rate of approved drugs is below 30 per cent. The idea for Cellworks is to apply the best practices and successes from an orthogonal domain to healthcare.

Can you explain to us how do use the simulation technology to minimise or lower the deployment cost in the healthcare industry?

Simulation technology can identify right treatment for a patient and identify right patient for a clinical trial. Computer simulations can predict patient clinical responses to specific drug treatments thereby eliminating adverse events and costs of ineffective treatments. Simulations can identify novel treatments the patient is more likely to respond to.