Oriana Papin-Zoghbi, Co-Founder and CEO of AOA Dx, led her company to develop an AI-driven blood test for the early detection of ovarian cancer. Dreary statistics inspired her focus. Today, about 70 to 80 percent of women who are diagnosed with ovarian cancer are diagnosed at stage 3 and 4, and their five-year survival rate is 28 percent.
“There is no more real-world impact than being able to take those women who are diagnosed with stage 3 and 4 ovarian cancer and diagnose them instead at stage 1 and 2 when their five-year survival rate is 90 percent,” Papin-Zoghbi told Cure.
Rather than only looking at proteins in the blood to detect cancer, her test uses AI-enabled multi-technology, which relies on advanced machine learning to bring together multiple different types of biological features, such as lipids and proteins in the blood, and clinical patient data.
“What we’ve been able to do with the advancements in technology is combine all of these different biological features with clinical features as well, such as a patient’s age or other features,” said Papin-Zoghbi. “It’s the combination that really allows us to transform our diagnostic power--our ability to differentiate is this disease or is this not disease?”
The test has a documented accuracy of 90+ percent in identifying cancer in symptomatic women, outperforming the current Dx standard, CA125.
Cultural Roots Influence Passion in Women’s Health
Papin-Zoghbi was born in Venezuela, where her mother studied to become a doctor. Her father is Lebanese, and when Papin-Zoghbi was a baby, the family moved to the Middle East. She lived there until she moved to the United States for college.
Growing up in the Middle East, she experienced the lack of priority placed on women’s health and status.
“My mother was this esteemed surgeon and she had to be driven to her hospital because she couldn’t take the car herself,” she said.
While her mom’s career influenced her interest in health sciences and she gravitated toward subjects like biology, chemistry, and physics, Papin-Zoghbi majored in economics and international relations. Her internships at a small company in Spain and at a women’s health startup in Boston are what prepared her most for entrepreneurship.
“I think what set me up for a career as an entrepreneur was working for other entrepreneurs, learning from other entrepreneurs, and then going out and doing it myself,” said Papin- Zoghbi.
Her early work focused on global health, including infectious diseases and establishing HPV screening and cervical cancer screenings in countries like Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Peru.
“I remember when I was working on HPV, women wouldn’t show up because it was so taboo for them to be screened. Much of the work I had to do was education on how getting screened for HPV could help eliminate the risk of cervical cancer,” said Papin-Zoghbi.
She keeps this bigger picture in mind when she faces obstacles at AOA Dx.
“Sometimes when the going gets really tough, what keeps me going is knowing this is all greater than me,” she said.
Company Born with the Intent to Fight Cancer
Before founding AOA Dx in 2020, Papin-Zoghbi worked at several different startups focused on women’s health and life sciences. For about 10 years, she worked with her AOA Dx co-founders Alex Fisher and Anna Jeter on and off before they teamed up to start the company.
“I had this passion that the status quo in women’s health is unacceptable. I could either go work for people that are trying to solve it or I can try to be a part of the solution myself,” she said.
The founders focused their efforts on finding big problems in women’s health and how they could provide solutions. They zoned in on the lack of diagnostics in ovarian cancer, preeclampsia, and more.
“We said where is the really exciting research that we can draw from to build the right technology?”
They went to universities, conferences, and technology transfer offices to hunt.
“We would joke and say we were a search fund without the funds. We lived off our savings and did a little consulting,” said Papin-Zoghbi.
At the end of 2019, one of her mentors connected her to scientist Uri Saragovi, PhD, at McGill University in Montreal, who helped bring the test to fruition. He already had an existing innovation disclosure, which AOA Dx exclusively licensed.
While they had the science and technology, they weren’t sure it would translate to a viable business model.
“In the early days, when we were in the pandemic and we had some non-dilutive funding, it was only if we could really see that it was viable to the end that we would invest our time, our money, our blood, sweat, tears,” said Papin-Zoghbi.
They spent a year ensuring their product met the needs of three Ps — patient, provider, and payer.
“We ended up raising money and we’ve successfully built out our own lab and team,” said Papin- Zoghbi.
Because Saragovi worked at McGill University, AOA Dx received non-dilutive funding in Canada, which funded their early academic research. They also raised money from friends and family and through Y Combinator, venture capital, equity round, and strategics like LabCorp and Danaher.
Hiring Technical Talent Posed Biggest Challenge
Early on, Papin-Zoghbi said the biggest challenge the company faced was hiring qualified technical talent.
“When you don’t have the big bucks to bring in the rock stars, it’s tough. But also, we learned that we needed to hire people [fit] for a startup culture,” she said.
Today although the company has matured, fundraising is more challenging.
“In the life sciences, there are a lot of funders that fund founders and ideas and breakthrough in the very early days and then you have a lot of funders that are late-stage commercial revenue generating,” she said. “There is a gap in players that fund the middle area where you are a capital intensive startup that requires regulatory clinical studies.”
Competition in women’s health companies is another challenge.
“Sometimes you find investors who say, ‘I’ve made my one investment in women’s health and I’m all done now,” said Papin-Zoghbi. “But honestly, the women’s health community has a lot of comradery and we try to say you can invest in menopause just as much as you can invest in cancer just as much as you can invest in fertility.”
In the last five years, she said there has been an increase in ovarian cancer research and companies focusing on it, which excites her.
“We want to do with ovarian cancer what the breast cancer community did for breast cancer. There’s not one breast cancer company, there’s not one breast cancer solution, but there’s an enormous amount of funding,” Papin-Zoghbi said. “And [all that] has impacted early detection rates and transformed patient care.”
Embracing Machine Learning is the Way Forward
In a world where individuals want more access to their information and more control over their health, Papin-Zoghbi said the patient voice is getting stronger and stronger, and less dominated by providers and payers.
“If we’re not listening to that and adapting to that market landscape, we’re going to get stuck in the past,” she said.
To stay on trend, she said AOA Dx will continue to leverage machine learning and data science to serve patients.
“We truly envision ourselves with our product on the market, being ordered by clinicians so that when patients come in and complain of vague abdominal symptoms, there is a tool that helps manage them in the appropriate way,” she said.