SimBioSys, Inc. is a technology company addressing deployment of Computational Oncology to transform decision making and patient experience in cancer care. By virtualizing cancer it is suggested, clinicians and patients are empowered with a better understanding of the disease and can assess all available options computationally to truly individualize treatment. To that end, the firm is developing novel computational tools for biomedical researchers that integrate large biological and histology datasets (genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics) to provide new insight into the behavior and prognosis of cancers. Anchored in the doctoral research in computational biology undertakenby the two founders, the technology under devlopment would allow doctors and scientists to peer into diseased tissue to see how cells are interacting. Techniques currently available to analyze these interactions are limited. Technologies to image tissues at high resolution - such as mass spectrometry - in fact destroy the tissue and can only capture a single moment in time. Other technologies, such as MRI or PET scans, can show several points in time, but the images are low resolution. SimBioSys is creating a way to view interactions in tissues with high resolution at many time points. Their approach is to create computer simulations that combine several types of data being generated by the -omics revolution genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics with low resolution images from scans such as from an MRI. By analyzing all aspects of the interactions that occur within tissues, they hope to gain a better understanding of how they behave and what underlying features give rise to disease. Though the technology has relevance to a range of diseases, the near term focus will be on breast cancer,
