BreakBio Founder Sets Out to Cure Cancer with AI After Wife’s Diagnosis at Young Age

Kate Middleton's cancer diagnosis at age 42 shocked the world, but abdominal cancers are being seen at younger ages — and a similar experience inspired one tech entrepreneur to find a cure.

Roy de Souza previously founded the ad-serving platform ZEDO, but switched his focus to personalized medicine after his wife was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017. At the time, their children were around the same age as Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5.

When de Souza's wife was diagnosed, he began "trying to find a way to keep her alive," he said. But "solid cancers, once they spread, they're not very easy to cure." His wife died in December 2020.

After learning more about cancer and talking to experts, de Souza founded BreakBio Corp. with a mission to cure metastatic and abdominal cancers, including colon and rectal cancer, using artificial intelligence to develop personalized treatments tailored to each individual patient.

His work has since been recognized by the American Cancer Society, and BreakBio is set to start two new clinical trials this summer.

"Getting to reliable cures at scale for these solid cancers is my purpose in life for now," de Souza said. "They are difficult and so unfair, but we can beat them."

De Souza leveraged his experience in cloud-based software to develop BreakBio's approach to personalized medicine, using artificial intelligence to analyze cancer cells from a patient and design a unique set of drugs, which are then manufactured for just that patient.

Unlike other illnesses and infectious diseases, for which a single drug can treat different patients, "Cancer cells are different in different parts of the tumor, and different in different patients. So, we just need many different drugs," de Souza said.

"You need to do multiple targets at the same time, so you can get all the cancer," he said. After analyzing a patient's cancer cells, BreakBio finds 30 targets.

"We sort of build drugs to go off to those 30 targets, and the drug stimulates the body to create T-cells to fight the 30 targets," he said.

BreakBio has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to start two new clinical trials in June, one with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and one with Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

"Colorectal cancer is one where we can move very fast through the process, because it's an unmet medical need," de Souza said. But BreakBio also plans to tackle "the difficult cancers" like pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain tumor.

"My aim is to really get a treatment for many solid cancers that actually works reliably at scale," he said. "You've got to shoot for cures."