Forcing Cancers to Reveal Themselves

Sam Gambhir understood the ravages of cancer. His wife developed breast cancer and survived. His son later developed brain cancer at the age 15 and died. And in 2020, Gambhir himself succumbed to cancer. Before he died, though, Gambhir, who served as division chief of the Canary Center for Early Cancer Detection and Molecular Imaging at Stanford University, hit upon an idea. Rather than hunt for cancers in the hopes of making an early diagnosis, he devised a way for them to produce synthetic biomarkers to cause them to reveal themselves. He co-founded Earli, which seeks to enable the diagnosis cancers when they are most treatable. We spoke to David Suhy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Earli, about the company’s synthetic biomarker technology that makes cancers visible with a PET scan, how it works, and how this has the potential to alter outcomes for patients by enabling treatments of patients before their disease progresses.