Other cancer-care startups see an opportunity to get patients supplementary services, like nutrition counseling, through care coordination. The founding doctors include cancer luminaries Lew Cantley, director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, Karen Vousden, Francis Crick Institute’s chief scientist of Cancer Research in the U.K., and Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center and author of The Emperor of All Maladies. Faeth Therapeutics, which raised $20 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures and Future Ventures, is researching how a more precise approach to nutrition can help make cancer treatments more effective.
These startups are equipping patients with more information than they can reasonably get from googling.Some cancer centers, like Memorial Sloan Kettering, may provide nutrition coaches for patients, but many facilities don’t have that specialty. But the number-one interest in the U.S., she says, is nutrition. She sees more investment going into behavioral health services such as mindfulness, meditation, acupuncture, and even cancer-focused mental health therapy. Chemotherapy has notoriously adverse side effects. “I think there’s a real interest, and a legitimate one, in finding ways of self-managing many of the aspects of a chronic illness like cancer.” Cancer patients not only have to manage the effects of their disease, but also the effects of the treatment. “A lot of cancer patients, cancer survivors, and caregivers of cancer survivors find that getting cancer care in a very fragmented healthcare system is difficult,” says oncologist Lidia Schapira, director of the Cancer Survivorship Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute. The investment represents a trend in healthcare to help cancer patients handle symptoms, side effects, depression, diet, their appointment calendar, and even how they plan to finance their care. The company has just raised $25 million from General Catalyst, Human Capital, W Health Ventures, Redesign Health, and 7wireVentures.
The platform offers care management and a library of resources on everything from how to handle side effects to financial planning. Jasper Health is part of a wave of startups that hope to expand the notion of what cancer care is. “I know what time and I know what doctor and I know where.” “I get notifications of every single appointment, which is so helpful to me,” Draper says. She set up a shareable appointment calendar on Jasper Health so that her family and friends could help coordinate travel and childcare while she was in treatment. His daughter, who homeschools her children, wanted to keep up her kids’ routine, but needed help. “They have to almost kill you to save your life,” Draper says.