CollabRx was born out of personal necessity. A decade ago I was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, a disease that had no effective therapies and a dire prognosis. I initially consulted several local oncologists, all of whom had different recommendations. I then undertook a nationwide search for clinical trials, several of which appeared promising. But no one could answer the key question on any patient’s mind : which treatment or trial is likely to work best for me? Ten years ago, the technology and knowledge needed to answer this question wasn’t available at any price. Patients were forced to make life and death decisions based on trial and error, medical guesswork, or even their zip code – what was available locally.

I gathered all the information I could and made an informed guess, betting my life on a vaccine trial that ultimately failed. Still, some participants in that trial responded well. I was lucky enough to be one of them. Why did the vaccine work for me and not for others? Thanks to the genomics revolution and advances in related technologies like computational and systems biology, we now have the means to answer such questions, and more importantly, to predict which treatments are likely to work best for an individual cancer patient. I started CollabRx so that today’s patients can seek optimal treatments, based not on their zip codes, but on the molecular zip codes of their tumors.

Read more of our story in the Wall Street Journal: “Putting Drug Development In Patient’s Hands”.

You can also listen to my interview on "Open Source Science".

Feel free to contact me anytime at marty@collabrx.com or +1-650-681-4581.

- Marty Tenenbaum, Chairman, CEO, and Chief Scientist