Thomas TURCAT Founder and COO

Thomas Turcat

Founder & COO

My name is Thomas, I’m French. One grandmother English and the other one is American. Despite that, I keep a typical French accent when I speak English.

A few years ago, I lost both of my parents to cancer. My father was first diagnosed with prostate cancer, which a surgeon attempted to remove. After learning that the surgery failed, my dad started chemotherapy. His first round of chemo was unsuccessful, so his oncologist offered him three different solutions. The physician explained that he was unsure what treatment would be best for him, so he wrote each therapy on 3 different pieces of paper and asked my father to choose one blindly.

The absurdity of this story made me lose trust in doctors, something no one should ever feel, especially when the lives of people we care about are in their hands.

While we should have complete confidence in our caregivers – particularly in oncologists – and trust they know how to care for our loved ones with cancer or us personally, I realized that:

  • First, that cancer is still an unknown wild beast,
  • And secondly, that oncologists, despite their very high level of education and expertise, are not able to follow and absorb the tremendous and constantly growing knowledge in oncology.

After losing my father, I was heavily involved in my mother’s medical care. I went to all meetings with her oncologist, and I stayed with her during each and every single chemo session…

Unfortunately, she eventually passed away as well, and to me, all this strengthened the idea that oncologists – despite their deep understanding and knowledge of this awful disease – are helpless and almost blind in this fight.

I mourned and continued to live with these wounds and feelings of helplessness and resignation.

This was years ago. Years that I lived trying to forget all this… until I met Dr. Afshar.

He has been working for fifteen years developing an artificial intelligence that will assist oncologists to find the most optimal therapy for their patients.

He explained to me how and why cancer is more than a disease:

this beast is developing within the patient, growing with its own DNA which is different from the patient’s healthy cells one.

He told me how technology can now establish the patient’s own genomic profile so that we can compare gene characteristics against global and worldwide drug and therapy databases in order to know which ones should best act on the tumor.

The amount of knowledge is so tremendous and constantly evolving that is not possible for a human to fully embrace it .

This is why Dr. Afshar and his team created this Artificial Intelligence that they named KEM.

KEM makes possible in a fragment of second to match a tumor’s profile with therapies that would best respond to it.

Dr. Afshar has worked on this for years in collaboration with the best teams and hospitals in the world.

But in the pharmaco-medical environment process is extremely long. In listening to him, I realized that although KEM is working well, it could take years before patients could benefit from it.

This is why we need to make this available to patients. Now.

Patients must be able to access this tool, in order to:

  • Understand the complexity of the battle they’re engaged in,
  • Be proactive and help their oncologist access knowledge they may not have,
  • Constructively challenge regular therapies, which their oncologist could apply due to lack of information....
  • …and never ever feel not-in-control over their treatment, their future, and their health outcomes.

Patients should not feel hopeless anymore and understand their physician is somehow helpless in finding the right treatment.

This is why we are releasing  OmiCure™.