Eric Schadt, Founder and CEO, Sema4; Dean for Precision Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Chapters:
0:00 Is this DTC testing?
5:17 Natalis - Covering 193 childhood disorders
13:27 Are you going into the cancer risk game?
14:34 Why are you excited about this model?
19:45 Do you know any other play like this?
25:57 Will you be doing any follow-up studies with parents?
"We like to refer to it as consumer initiated, but physician supervised,” says Eric Schadt today when asked if his new test is direct-to-consumer.
Eric is the Dean for Precision Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and since 2016 has served as CEO of Sema4, a spinoff that he founded out of the Mount Sinai Health System. Sema4 launched a newborn screening panel, Sema4 Natalis, in February of this year covering over 190 disorders.
With 400 people already employed, Sema4 is based largely on genetic testing, data science, bioinformatics, and software development teams that were built up at Mount Sinai prior to the spinout. New panels will be marketed directly to parents around the country, many of whom have already bought other prenatal screening tests from Sema4.
From 2011 to 2017, Eric served as the Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai. He says he founded Sema4 to achieve a greater scale than could be had within a single hospital system. For him and Sema4, the end game is to "partner with" tens of millions of patients for ongoing studies. He calls it his "growth hack" strategy.
The Natalis panel is a practical place to start. Many of the additional rare childhood disorders that expand the panel beyond the conventional heel prick testing of 30-50 disorders are the result of new research and the latest technology and are a no brainer. This will bring some uniformity across states. And the new testing can be done from a cheek swab rather than the more invasive heel prick.
Still, some argue, Sema4 Natalis really amounts to doing research on parents. For the panel includes cancer risk tests as well.
Does Eric plan to do any follow up studies with parents? Mount Sinai is the sole owner of Sema4. Has any other major healthcare provider made a play similar to this?
