By the late noughties Talha Basit, the CEO and founder of Spiraldot Health, was “living his best life”. The computer science grad had enjoyed an enviable career in tech, starting out at Apple – where he worked directly with Steve Jobs – and since then he’d been on board a number of startups as a senior engineer. He’d recently enjoyed his first exit; then his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Soon, his life revolved around flights back and forth between San Francisco and her home in Chicago, “and I got a real first hand experience in how inefficient, fractured and slow my mom's care was.” 

A couple of moments stick out for Talha. On one occasion, an oncologist suggested that his mother might be a good fit for a clinical trial – but they told him to look it up himself. “I'm a computer scientist,” says Talha. “What could I possibly know about matching for clinical trials? When I brought that to his attention, he was like, ‘well, I don't have time to do this.’” Talha also found that the treatments being provided were not up to speed with the latest drug developments. “I realized that even the best oncologist at the University of Chicago, which is one of the best academic medical centres in the world, they just don't have the time to keep up with all the exponential changes in treatment and drugs.”

Turning pain into purpose

Talha began to think about how his work in AI, deep research and insights might benefit the healthcare sector. When his mother passed away, he was determined to turn the “pain into purpose.” He went on to work in three healthcare startups, with two exits. One was as the technical founder of divvyDOSE, which sold to United Health Care for half a billion dollars; the other was an AI clinical trial matching company which sold to Tempest. Over a decade would pass before he founded Spiraldot, which brings all his learnings from the previous start ups together. Talha describes Spiraldot Health as his life’s work. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” he says. 

Spiraldot Health, which is backed by Antler and has raised $5.4m from investors including Sofiinovva, is an innovative, AI-powered oncology platform that helps clinicians save time, deliver the highest quality treatments and make sure patients are receiving the most up-to-date, accurate treatments in the shortest amount of time. Since 2023 it has grown to a team of seven and deployed to five hospital systems and oncology clinics.

Joining up the data

One of the main reasons it took so long to come to fruition was the lag in tech. “When I looked at the landscape, there wasn't an ability yet to develop rich applications on top of the different datasets in healthcare because the data was too siloed,” he says. “I've been keeping my eye on when the data would finally be available…that didn't happen till 2023, and that's when I founded Spiraldot.” 

What really differentiates Spiraldot Health, says Talha, is that it’s not a point solution but a platform for all cancer care. From the point of inception he was working with a team who had followed him from his previous healthcare startups, as well as experienced clinicians, and “what we knew about where the market was going was that hospitals are overwhelmed with all of these point solutions that don't talk to each other.” They also knew that “a lot of the solutions have not taken the time to integrate directly into the clinicians workflow. And that's something that we did, based on our experience, much, much better than anybody else.” 

Even so, he adds, one of the biggest challenges was having to educate the market. “We found that the most innovative places could see what we were doing,” he says, citing customers including Mayo Clinic, Wellness Oncology and AstraZeneca. "Our solution really is more impactful to the regional and rural cancer centers who don't have experts like Mayo does, and we are deploying to them right now.”

Solving for the future of medicine

The market for this tech is huge, Talha explains. On the provider side, it’s in the multi-billions. But the market for the life science and pharmaceutical sector is far, far bigger. Now that Spiraldot Health is working with an established network of healthcare providers it is looking to expand its “two-sided” revenue model. For hospitals and clinics, the platform provides improved care, efficiency and increased revenue. It also gathers valuable data, which can be sold to life science companies that want to better understand which treatments are most effective, and how different treatments are being selected; AstraZeneca is the first to come on board. 

As cancer treatments advance, drawing on increasingly detailed patient profiles, Spiraldot Health – which is building a new infrastructure for AI in healthcare – is well positioned to stay ahead of the curve. Already, it is seeing potential to support innovations that were not even on its roadmap five years ago. Right now, Talha says, we are seeing the rise of new, ultra-precise cancer treatments such as radioligand therapy, where radiotherapy treatments are custom designed for patients. “It requires a far richer dataset,” he says. “Which we can provide.”