Seven Years to Twelve Weeks: Ending the Diagnostic Odyssey

What were your thoughts that formed Sunstone Health? And as you start to get more informed, I had a great network, right? Like I'm a Boston scientist.

So I've been a research tech at MIT for this amazing woman, Sangeeta Bhatia.

I had done grad work at Tufts.

I worked at Harvard Med.

I worked at a biotech.

Like I knew lots of doctors, lots of specialists.

I had great access.

And as you start to talk to people and understand where the pain points are in the system, one of the most glaring ones is the lack of precision medicine.

The fact that every doc, every specialist is still trying to wiggle out what's wrong with you based on the symptoms that are presenting in front of you, not necessarily what the root cause of the problem is.

And the way you get to the root cause of the problem is genetics.

For 99% of these patients, for all of us, your genes are really going to dictate what happened.

So at first we were like, all right, well, we're just going to figure out a way to go out and genetically sequence everybody.

I think that's still probably the right thing for medicine to do, but it's not the right thing from the medical market to do today, right? It is not cost-effective to go out and sequence everyone.

Someday it will be, but today it's not.

So then you start to learn about like, there's lots of different varieties of genetics, right? There's single gene tests, there's gene panel tests, there's whole exome, there's whole genome, there's long read, right? So you have to figure out like, what is the actual best bang for your buck for taking care of these? What I came to understand is when I did my, like I'm a systems engineer, you know, ultimately.

So when I went through and did ultimately like my analysis for where the pain points were in the system, you know, like how do you build a product? Because at first you're like, hey, I'm going to make a nonprofit.

Great idea.

There's lots of amazing nonprofits out there.

They're doing fantastic work.

But the challenge I see them all have is they gotta go pass the hat at some point.

You gotta go raise money to go help people.

And unless you can raise enough money, you're gonna go out of business.

And so I really wanted to build something that I knew could scale.

because I really want to help not tens of patients or hundreds of patients, but millions of patients.

The way you do that is you go recruit venture money.