Precision medicine, now and in the future. A conversation with Thomas Clozel, Co-founder and CEO @ Owkin

Looking Outward — A GenieUs Genomics interview series

As we build GenieUs and our purpose to accelerate diagnostics and therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases, we like to take inspiration from those pioneers in parrellel spaces. One of those companies is Owkin, the cancer start up that is redefining the cancer space. We have followed Owkin for some time and are continuously inspired and impressed by what they do. We sat down and spoke to their Co-founder and CEO, Thomas, about how they have managed to come so far in a such a short space of time….

Q1. You’re a Medical Doctor, why did you decide not to pursue a career as a typical clinician and what inspired you to change your path to starting Owkin?
A1. I was doing research on the side in the lymphoma space, and I felt that the possibilities of traditional medicine were limited — we were doing what everyone else was doing and nothing was changing. So, I thought it would be cool to bring some kind of new approach. When I started to read and learn about machine learning and all its capabilities, I thought this could be way to revolutionise what is already known. I mean, machine learning allows you to find correlations in a non-linear way, so you can…