New Year's Day: Rebirth and New Beginnings

It was U2 who sang, “Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.” In the same song, they say, “I will begin again.”

So, if, Bono will begin again, but nothing changes on New Year’s Day, is it that the changes will come post New Year, or, rather, Bono will begin again but nothing will change, year over year? What is it, Bono?!

I like to think that it is the former: New Year’s is time for rebirth and new beginnings, but it doesn’t magically happen because the clock changes over to the next year. He will begin again, with the new year as a line of demarcation.

It is a salient point of the song. The New Year is both a time of reflection, and a time of rebirth and new beginnings, but you have to actually do the work to “begin again;” it will not happen magically on New Year’s (nothing changes on New Year’s Day…) or any other day, for that matter.

Just because you bought the gym membership, or just because you decide that January is the perfect time to try out that new diet, (January, is after all, world carnivore month), doesn’t mean you’ll instantly change. You will need to implement some tactics to maximize your change strategy.

It’s with this sentiment in mind that I’d like to formally announce xCures’ transition from an oncology-focused company, to one that is more clinically agnostic.

Think of it as a new beginning. But nothing really has changed, either (just like U2 sang!). We still have unparalleled oncology datasets that our partners can leverage for all kinds of important projects to support research and clinical development. To date, using our direct to patient approach, we have consented longitudinal medical records from over 50,000 cancer patients (25K+ malignant), with all their records from all providers and sites of care.

But this isn’t just their oncology data; we have records from every care encounter, such as cardiology, rheumatology, family medicine. There’s simply so much data on a per patient basis that it is almost disingenuous to say we’re an oncology-only company because we have so much non-oncology data, even for our patient population who has cancer.

Speaking of our patient population, we are up to more than 130,000 patients on the xCures platform. And I just said we had ~50K cancer patients, half of which are malignant. So, that leaves about 100,000 patients’ worth of data for folk who do not have malignant cancer.

Then the question becomes, well, who are these people. And the answer is, it’s all sorts of folks, many of whom have chronic conditions. IBD, Colitis, Crohn’s, Eczema, Psoriasis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Atopic Dermatitis, Lups, Celiac, Hidradenitis suppurativa, Ankylosing spondylitis, Myasthenia gravis, Scleroderma. And those are just the Immune and Inflammatory Diseases!

So, while nothing changes on New Year’s Day, we will also begin again, and 2024 is the year that, while we still are the same company, we are unrolling new clinical datasets available for our partners to license.

In addition to all the current oncology datasets we offer, we’re launching dozens of new datasets outside of oncology. I already mentioned the Immune and Inflammatory Disease Datasets.

In cardiopulmonary, we have ASCVD, heart failure, heart valve disorders, deep vein thrombosis, COPD, Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation.

In neurology/CNS, we have migraine, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Bell’s Palsy, Dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, Schizophrenia, Depression, ADD/ADHD, Anxiety, Bipolar.

We also have a few rare disease datasets, such as Lynch Syndrome, Hemoglobinopathies, and Cystic Fibrosis.

We even have obesity, and a semaglutide-specific dataset.

There are more, but these are the main datasets to mention.

Like I said, nothing about xCures is changing. We’re just doing more of what we do for more patients, which has enabled us to expand beyond oncology and offer the most robust datasets across myriad diseases, but within oncology and other disease areas as well.

Buckle up, 2024 is going to be a big year.

Happy New Year,

Max