Patrick Short, Co-Founder and CEO of Sano Genetics joins IBIS Capital Associate, Bracy Fertig in an engaging discussion on how he made the leap from research to entrepreneurship, building a business to make research trials equally more compelling for participants and more effective for researchers. Learn about Sano’s role in delivering personalised medicine, and hear Patrick’s perspectives on data privacy, transparency and ownership in research as well as the company’s mission to expand their impact and reach with precision medicine.
HealthTechX Stories are produced as video podcasts. The following captures the conversation in written format, but is not a verbatim transcript. The original video is available to watch on the HealthTechX website.
Interview with Patrick Short
Patrick Short is the CEO of Sano Genetics. Originally from the US, he now lives in Cambridge, England where he has been based for close to nine years.
Can you tell us a little bit about Sano Genetics?
We’re about a four year old company. We started in late 2018, and we’ve been working on building what we call a participant engagement platform. We work with pharma companies, biotech companies, as well as a new class of organization called population genomics programs. Our software helps them to manage the relationship between the research program and the participants. That includes everything from what the study is about, landing pages, consent forms, screening questions, and a big aspect of what we do is genetic testing and reporting as well. So, we help to take large scale multicountry genetic testing studies and make them easy to take part in for participants.
Is there a defining moment or a person in your life who inspired you to found Sano?
I come from a research background and did my undergrad at the University of North Carolina. I worked in a couple of different research groups there. Then, I moved over to the UK to do my PhD at the Sangre Institute in Cambridge. And in both of those cases, I was surrounded by researchers who were very entrepreneurial. I thought that was a really great combination because companies are a great vehicle, if set up right, to actually take new discoveries or ideas and put a business model behind them that helps them.
You either do research in the lab and you publish papers, or there’s this whole business and industry world. But I’ve always seen the two as close together. So, that had me thinking about starting a business in the first place. In terms of Sano specifically, I encountered a problem time and time again as a researcher in my PhD. We were collecting large scale genetic data sets, but it’s very difficult to actually recontact participants who are involved in these research programs, and this left a lot of missed opportunities. For example, if you’re collecting genetic data from hundreds of thousands of people, but those people can’t get notified about future research opportunities that could be incredibly impactful for them, then you’ve missed a real opportunity to potentially change somebody’s life. And there’s a whole bunch of other research questions that become possible if you’ve got a more fluid relationship between the researcher and the participant. On the participant side, I’ve been a participant in a lot of research studies, and the nature of research is still very analogue.
We think about what we ask research participants to do in exchange for what we actually get out of taking part in research, and the balance is often very out of whack. And it’s no wonder that we have recruitment and engagement challenges in research. This got my two co-founders and myself thinking about ways we could solve both these problems at the same time. Make research much more compelling for participants to take part in and easier to do, and also, at the same time, make it an order of magnitude easier, faster and more cost effective for researchers like us to bring on the next generation of personalized medicines.
At Sano, you believe that an individual’s health data belongs to that individual. Could you tell us about how that belief flows through to what you do on a daily basis?
A framework that I think is important to think about with research participation in general is, ‘what are the barriers to take part, and then what are the benefits to take part?’ As it’s become more and more apparent how important data privacy and ownership are, one of the big barriers is that we don’t want data privacy issues to get in the way of the cutting edge research we want to do. And for a long time, and I think arguably still today, research participants need to balance the benefit of taking part in a study against the personal risk of your data being used against you in some way. There’s no country that I’m aware of that has a watertight insurance non-discrimination policy. Even in the UK, you can be discriminated against based on your genetic data. So, how do we give participants as much information as possible about what the potential risks are, but also the confidence that their data is not going to be shared in ways that they haven’t signed up for?
That was a central pillar of the way we’ve built the company from the beginning and this manifests in a lot of ways, but one of the major ways is in the platform and the product itself. Participants can see all the data they’ve added, exactly who they have or haven’t consented for that data to be shared with. So, there’s a clear transparency there and also easy controls to remove data, download it for yourself, to have a copy, delete your data if you need to. Transparency is a key value for us as a company, although that doesn’t remove the risks for participants. However, we’ve found that people really appreciate the transparency and openness about what actually does go on behind the scenes.
Is the healthcare system making progress to deliver personalised medicine and what is Sano’s role in this?
There are two big buckets of personalized medicine that I’m interested in. One is on the rare disease side. There are possibly 8000 different genetic rare diseases. The vast majority of those don’t have any treatment whatsoever. In the last decade, we’ve seen transformative treatments in the form of gene therapies, gene editing, and also just fundamental advances in understanding rare disease and diseases that were previously untreatable. Now, there are cures on the market and I think this is one of the major promises — it’s one of the most powerful waves. I think that it’s going to take us a long time to actually see this through to the thousands of rare diseases, and there’s a whole layer of challenges there. But that’s one area I’m really excited about. And this starts with diagnostics and genome sequencing in the healthcare system.
The second is the reclassification of most common diseases into rarer genetic subtypes. For example, there are now more than 60 different well validated genetic drivers of Parkinson’s disease. A number of those are highly penetrant and monogenic, and point to a different treatment. We’ve seen this with cancer over the last 20 years. It’s gone from breast cancer to now 17 and counting different genetic subtypes of breast cancers with different treatments. We will see this in almost every major disease category. It’s going to change the way we treat disease and the way that we prevent disease. If we can predict the likelihood of somebody developing a common complex disease using their genetics, then we may be able to intervene earlier and not have to wait until someone has full-blown Alzheimer’s, for example. There are a lot of interesting clinical trials on the way looking at intervention before symptoms become so severe that it may be difficult to unwind the many decades of complex breakdown in the system.
What do the next five to ten years look like for you and for your business?
Today, we work in about 20 different diseases out of the 7000 or so that I mentioned before. For us, we’re excited that the sky is the limit in terms of the number of diseases that precision medicine approaches can be applied to. So, we’re looking to expand our impact in terms of the number of diseases we’re working in. Today, we’re working in Parkinson’s, ALS, Alzheimer’s, long COVID, and a number of immunological diseases like inflammatory bowel disease. But there are whole disease categories that are still not really touched by precision medicine. As the science advances, we’ll advance with that.
Secondly, we’re working on internationalizing our business. Right now, we operate in the US, the UK and some parts of the EU. Even between the US, UK and EU, the availability of genetic testing and the way precision medicine is being folded into the healthcare system is really different and it’s a global opportunity and a global problem that we need to solve. Ensuring that genetic testing and precision medicines, the research underpinning them, but also the access to those medicines in the form of clinical trials and ultimately approved therapies, is something that we can deliver worldwide and not just in those countries that I mentioned.
So, we’re investing a lot right now in building our internationalization capabilities and working with our customers — the pharma biotechs and population genomics programs — to offer a great participant research experience around the world and not just in those handful of countries.
To hear more from Patrick Short, follow ‘The Genetics Podcast’: https://podfollow.com/dna
