Health Tech: Tuvik Beker Of Pangea Biomed On How Their Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With David Leichner

Remember that being impactful doesn’t have to be “sexy” — having a positive social impact means creating technology that makes a difference. In healthcare, this often means a long and challenging journey. Still, the rewards along the way, like when you see your technology actually making a change for the better in patient lives, are truly incredible.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tuvik Beker.

Tuvik Beker is a seasoned entrepreneur, an experienced executive, and a strong technical leader who spent the last twenty years building, scaling, and leading companies in the healthcare, financial, and aerospace domains. As CEO of Pangea Biomed, he leads the development of the world’s most advanced platform for uncovering tumor vulnerabilities by combining supervised and unsupervised ML approaches for analysis of multi-omics and imaging data. Tuvik is a co-founder and director of MedAware Ltd.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

As a child, my main interest and fascination were with animals. I spent a lot of school time chasing lizards and looking for snakes and scorpions in the fields around my school. Fortunately, I was a good enough student, so my teachers turned a blind eye to my frequent absences. As I grew up, math became my focus more and more (though I still kept a collection of several dozen snakes in my bedroom). The advent of artificial neural network models in the 1990s drew me from pure math to Machine Learning. With time, my primary professional focus shifted to Machine Learning applications in the healthcare domain.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Early in Pangea Biomed’s journey, we focused on helping drug developers bring better drugs to the clinic more quickly. I remember the day when I got a call from Prof. Raanan Berger, head of Israel’s largest cancer center, who told me he had a young patient with a very rare cancer at an advanced stage whose case he wanted us to analyze with our ENLIGHT platform. I was taken aback because at that point, our technology had never been tried prospectively, but Prof. Berger reassured me with, “let me worry about that — I just want to see your analysis.” A couple of months later, I learned that the patient was responding remarkably well to the treatment highlighted by ENLIGHT, which went contrary to all standard biomarkers. Today, more than two and a half years later, that patient is still in complete remission and back to normal life. This case was recently presented in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are quite a few people I’m indebted to, but first among these is undoubtedly my older brother, Amir. As children, he taught me programming at a young age; as teenagers, we went on trips and explored foreign art and cuisine together; and as adults, he continues to be a constant source of inspiration and advice and a role model of conscientious entrepreneurship.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Few worthwhile things are easy, but fewer yet are impossible. This mantra has carried me through my career and especially with Pangea Biomed. In pursuit of an extremely complicated mission of democratizing precision oncology, this quote grounds me in motivation to push forward and bring effective treatment to cancer patients. After all, we’ve already beaten the odds and seen success; this is only the beginning.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The first is tenacity. With my first company, Soligence, my partner Yuval Spector and I were trying to raise money in 2001–2002 — a particularly tough period for entrepreneurs. We talked to more than 100 VCs and angel investors before we found one who believed in our vision: Larry Kubal of Labrador Ventures. After a long and circuitous journey, Soligence’s technology eventually landed at NASA.

Secondly, being open to criticism. In 2011, I spent a lot of time thinking about my next venture and came up with six great ideas for companies that could change medical practice using AI. My good friend and mentor, Eytan Ruppin, recommended that I meet with a physician called Gidi Stein, who also had a technical background and could serve as a sounding board for my ideas. I met with Gidi (at an awful hospital cafeteria), and he demolished my ideas one by one. His arguments were convincing, so rather than challenging him, I thanked him for saving me a lot of time and effort, and we parted as friends. A few months later, Gidi called Eytan and me with an idea of his own, which was firmly rooted in his medical practice. Together, we co-founded MedAware, which saves patients’ lives daily by identifying and preventing life-threatening prescription errors.

Lastly, realism. Leading companies that aim to revolutionize whole fields must shoot for the stars, but unrelenting optimism regarding the long term must be counterbalanced by harsh realism when it comes to reading signals from your immediate surroundings. In March 2022, we had several significant funds expressing interest in leading a Series A round and a lot of interest from potential followers. While VCs were still going through the motions of meeting and listening to pitches, I saw the clear signs of a bubble about to burst. I warned our team that the funding round might not be possible and that they should prepare for challenging work as we needed to double down on increasing revenues while pausing hiring efforts and non-essential expenses. At the same time, I reassured the whole team that their jobs were safe and that we shall persevere together as a team. We immediately shifted gears, changed targets, and more than doubled our Seed financing within a couple of months. Our efforts gave the company two years of runway regardless of revenues and will allow us to thrive through a possibly prolonged downturn. Today we are already growing again, taking advantage of the excellent talent released by companies that were less realistic at the critical turning point.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the technology or medical devices that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

Globally, cancer is the second leading cause of death; this year, more than 17 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States alone. Recent years have seen a revolution in precision oncology, introducing many effective new cancer drugs. Yet still, less than 10 percent of patients benefit from these new treatments, creating a gap between the resources for cancer research and care and its real-world impact. Closing this gap would require better biomarkers that match each patient with the most suitable drug. But therein lies the paradox of personalized medicine: the more “personalized” a treatment is, the harder it becomes to design clinical trials to test treatments since each patient is given a different treatment.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Pangea aims to bring effective precision oncology to most cancer patients, improve oncology drug development and empower oncologists to treat patients successfully. As the world’s most advanced multi-cancer response predictor, ENLIGHT is scalable to all cancer types and all targeted and immuno-oncology drugs. The technology increases the number of patients who can benefit from precision oncology by more than 5x.

Pangea’s platform uses advanced machine learning and RNA-sequencing to identify and observe gene group interactions, dubbed “gene social graphs,” to determine a patient’s best treatment match. The ENLIGHT technology dramatically shifts the way physicians are able to prescribe cancer care, uncovering hidden options for effective treatment.

To add to the critical patient benefits that Pangea provides, Pangea holds promise for scalable drug development with pharmaceutical companies. Pangea’s unique unsupervised machine learning approach makes ENLIGHT scalable and effective during the drug development process, when large clinical cohorts aren’t yet available.

However, to deliver personalized medicine solutions at scale, accurate biomarkers alone are not enough. To solve the paradox of personalized medicine, a paradigm shift will be required in the way regulators approach new drug approvals. A possible solution to the problem can be achieved by changing the focus of clinical trials: instead of testing a drug on a certain patient population chosen to be as “homogeneous” as possible, one could employ an inclusion based on a rigorous matching algorithm. The focus of the trial then becomes the algorithm rather than the rigid definitions of diagnosis, line of treatment, etc. The world will be better off if we can overcome the paradox of personalized medicine through machine learning and ultimately save the lives of cancer patients, especially those who otherwise would not benefit from traditional treatments.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

Cancer is a cruel disease; nearly everyone has lost a loved one to cancer. When my grandmother died of lung cancer, her diagnosis was a clear death sentence. A few decades later, many lung cancer cases can be effectively treated or even brought to complete remission thanks to new generations of targeted therapies. But this revolution still helps only a small fraction of the total cancer patient population.

Eytan Ruppin was my old Ph.D. advisor, and today he’s recognized as one of the top cancer data scientists in the world. I was immediately hooked when he told me about his discoveries on harnessing deep transcriptomics to uncover tumor vulnerabilities and attack them effectively. We are still at a very early stage of the journey, but Pangea is already making a real change in the life of patients, which keeps us all super motivated to continue fighting this cunning enemy called cancer.

How do you think this might change the world?

In this last year alone, Pangea had the potential to impact 1.7 million people in need of personalized cancer care. In 15 years, that number will increase to 25.5 million. All of Pangea’s work also supports President Biden’s cancer moonshot plan, which aims to decrease cancer deaths over the next ten years.

Pangea is already saving the lives of patients via pro bono compassionate testing offerings, and large-scale clinical trials testing ENLIGHT in prospective interventional settings are currently underway.

In addition to quality care and support, Pangea emphasizes that every cancer patient deserves a chance at remission through effective treatment. Pangea’s sophisticated machine learning techniques can empower the full gamut of drug development — from target discovery, through rational drug design, to optimal clinical trial design and combination therapy planning based on advanced biomarkers — to better serve cancer patients looking for solutions. With this potential, we are already engaged in several collaborations with biopharma companies.

Ultimately, because ENLIGHT uses the exact same algorithm for many different therapies and cancer types, broad clinical trials can be conducted to test the underlying treatment nomination algorithm while matching each patient with the most appropriate therapy, thus solving the paradox of personalized medicine.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?

1. Find the gaps within a space — especially if filling those gaps means addressing challenges that others deem inconsequential or impossible. In Pangea’s case, one of these gaps was the intrinsic scarcity of data linking cancer therapies, multi-omics, and outcomes. With many new therapies being invented and tried every year, we can never have sufficient data to train new supervised learning algorithms for all drugs. Pangea solved this gap by focusing on understanding functional genetic interactions in a treatment-independent manner, then using that understanding to answer treatment-specific questions.
2. Choose the right people to go on the tech development journey with you — finding a great team is one of the most important predictors of success. Fortunately for us, Pangea’s mission is so compelling that it’s easy to draw the best and brightest minds to join us on this journey. For me, it’s also a closure of a circle, bringing me back to work closely with two people I worked with around 25 years ago: Eytan Ruppin, who was my Ph.D. mentor and is one of Pangea’s scientific co-founders, and Ranit Aharonov, our amazing CTO, who has remained a close friend since our days as Ph.D. students in Eytan’s lab.
3. Plan for scale from the beginning — when building your tech, build with rapid iterations but with the flexibility to scale, so you don’t need to spend a lot of time refactoring; assume your tech might hit it big from the get-go! In Pangea, we built our analysis and report generation infrastructure in a flexibly scalable manner from day one. Relying on elastic cloud resources ensures that we can keep processing time short and entirely predictable no matter how many samples we need to process.
4. Seek out the right advisors, investors, and partners — be sure not only to look for those who will provide financial support but also expertise, experience, and counsel. This may be a worn-out cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less important or true. The best investors offer a wealth of wisdom, connections, and advice, but count on founders to understand their specific business better than anyone else.
5. Remember that being impactful doesn’t have to be “sexy” — having a positive social impact means creating technology that makes a difference. In healthcare, this often means a long and challenging journey. Still, the rewards along the way, like when you see your technology actually making a change for the better in patient lives, are truly incredible.

Can you share a few best practices that you recommend to safeguard your technology or medical devices from hackers?

Since I’m not a security expert myself, my best advice is to hire top experts to safeguard your technology from hackers.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

We all bear the benefits and consequences of tomorrow. We walk the same planet and breathe the same air — it’s our job to take care of each other. Specifically, cancer affects millions of people every day. If it hasn’t affected you yet, it’s likely affecting someone you know. Making a positive impact not only helps propel society forward, it helps you and the people you love.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

I would love to meet with Barack Obama, one of the most admirable world leaders currently alive. The list of questions I would like to ask him about the limitations of power and how he sees the new world order is endless.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Tuvik Beker — CEO of Pangea Biomed — Israel | LinkedIn

Pangea Biomed | LinkedIn

https://twitter.com/BekerTuvik

https://twitter.com/pangeabiomed?lang=en

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.