The thing that impacted me the most in my previous life as a translational scientist was the regular chats we had with patients or their caretakers. Shifting from abstract work in the lab to grappling with real world consequences to patients is always daunting and exciting. At the end of these chats, patients are always asked what else the researchers could do to improve their lives. And the answer is always the same: "Can you move faster?" We founded Percept Biosciences to answer that question. Over the past year we have spoken to hundreds of patients and advocacy groups and what we discovered has totally changed how I think this era of drug discovery is going to unfold and how fast new drugs could get developed.

Patients and caregivers today arrive remarkably prepared. Using every tool at their disposal, they learn the science of their condition and, critically, solve a classic coordination problem by forming patient advocacy groups (PAGs). These groups support people through diagnosis, build communities, and increasingly fund early and translational research. The thing that blew me away though was how many of these PAGs were creating their own datasets - omics, screening datasets, biomarker datasets - nominally to make their disease "ready for the industry," but in fact only a few steps away from actually being ready to develop their own drugs. We think this trend of PAGs owning more of the translational work is going to accelerate. Successes are not far away, and they will snowball.

Getting data is only one step. Making sense of it is hard and taking action is harder still, because biology is complex. We designed the Percept Biosciences Development Plan Agent to make sense of data in an actionable way. We believed it will change how biotechs will develop their drugs (and still think it will). But we now think the impacts on PAGs and patients using our system is going to be huge. This is who we serve.

Every analytics company claims to want to convert data into action. But data or analytics, on its own, is inert; it cannot direct action. The direction comes from the decision framework we put on it - a set of values that focuses our efforts.

Here’s ours: Every drug. For every patient. As soon as possible. What would this mean for you?

• Patient/PAG-first partnerships. You have a say in how (and how fast) drugs get tested for your condition

• Data stewardship. Patients get access to critical data. At all times.

• No shelving. We won’t stop talking if the ideal drug “belongs” to some other company. We will find ways to facilitate repurposing of the best drug for your patients.

Patients get to control their data and the fate of the repurposed drug they choose to invest their time and money into.

The "how will we get there" is complex and involves a few steps which we will talk about shortly. It largely revolves around automating most of the steps that matter in developing proof of concept data for any given drug.

If you would like to know more about what taking action on your data looks like, drop me a line. I'd love to chat.