Social Impact Tech: Mika Newton of xCures On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
At xCures, we are creating a platform to enable cancer patients and their doctors to make the best possible treatment decisions considering the complexity of the disease and many potential treatment options. We do this by capturing clinical trial quality data from every patient to suggest what might be most appropriate to do and then continuing to collect the data to learn about what does or doesn’t work.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mika Newton.
Mika Newton, Chief Executive Officer of xCures talks to Medium and Authortiy Magazine on what it takes to be a leader in business, run an organization like xCures and how the technology behind xCures can provide a positive impact to cancer patients around the world.
xCures operates a precision oncology platform that includes direct-to-patient and direct-to-physician portals. The platform uses Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning algorithms and Natural Language Processing to identify the most promising treatment options for advanced cancer patients.
The platform supports tumor boards and captures valuable data to help accelerate the development of promising new cancer drugs, expand the approved uses of existing drugs, and demonstrate value for reimbursement.
Mika has more than 20 years of commercial strategy and leadership experience in life sciences, with a focus on novel technologies. Over the last 10 years, Mika has concentrated on evidence-based medicine and tools to transform healthcare and clinical development. Before joining xCures Mika was the Chief Commercial Officer of Doctor Evidence, LLC. Prior to Doctor Evidence he was the General Manager of Clinical Development Services at diaDexus, SVP of Client and Market Development at Evidera, VP of Sales and Marketing at Archimedes, and held sales management and sales operations roles at Quintiles, Invitrogen and Tripos.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I combined a short vacation with business travel in Europe and traveled by train to the Frankfurt airport the night before an early flight home. I was traveling with my fiancé and we had a fair amount of luggage and had to get off the train quickly. My fiancé had hurt her hand and was scheduled for emergency surgery as soon as we returned so she could not help with the baggage. The hotel we were staying in that night was in the airport train station and when I went to check-in, I realized I had forgotten my briefcase with my computer and our passports on the train. Luckily, we were able to go to the ticket counter and they called the high-speed train conductor and explained where we had been sitting. The train was already over 100KM away, but they found the bag and passed it across the platform to a train coming back in our direction. We had dinner and at the expected time, I went back toward the platform to hopefully retrieve the bag. A huge crowd was gathered at the platform. When I asked what was happening, I learned that there had been a suicide at one of the stations further up the line and all the trains were stopped. The stoppage lasted for 6 hours. During this time, I met a ticketing manager who happened to be Turkish. My fiancé, now my wife, is Turkish and so we chatted for several hours with this nice man who made a couple of calls to assure us the bag was still coming. Many hours later, when the right train pulled into the station, we asked the conductor if they had the bag and they had no idea what we were talking about. The train was only scheduled to be at the station for 3 minutes to let passengers on and off. The Turkish ticketing agent called his friend who was all the way at the other end of the train. These trains are very long. He and I then literally sprinted down the entire platform dodging between passengers and baggage. He saw his friend as the train was already starting to move and started jumping up and down yelling. My briefcase was thrown to me from the rapidly accelerating train. It took a village to get our things back but every single person we met did everything they possibly could to help us. The sight of the bag flying towards me from the open window of the train is one I will never forget.
Is there a particular person whom you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My high school rugby coach was also my AP biology teacher. I was never a good student, but with his mentorship, I fell in love with the subject and never looked back. It is the combination of biological sciences and technology that has been the basis of every part of my career.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Only from the heart can you touch the sky.” — Jalāl al-DīnMuḥammadRūmī
I love this quote as it speaks to me about doing what you love. When you work on things you care about you achieve deep satisfaction and can sustain the effort for extended periods of time.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Intentionality
It is important to know “what you really want” and prioritize making it a reality. There are so many distractions every day that being able to keep your end goal in mind and consistently making progress is central to success
Perseverance
You have to stick with it. I have experienced repeated failure in almost every project that I ever eventually succeeded at. You have to learn from every situation but if you give up you will never get to any conclusion other than failure
Conscientiousness
Work on things that matter. When you believe that what you are doing will make a real difference, you create an energy reserve that will take you through the most difficult challenges.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
At xCures, we are creating a platform to enable cancer patients and their doctors to make the best possible treatment decisions considering the complexity of the disease and many potential treatment options. We do this by capturing clinical trial quality data from every patient to suggest what might be most appropriate to do and then continuing to collect the data to learn about what does or doesn’t work. The data and knowledge are shared with the patients and doctors through our applications which act as an engagement mechanism and a platform for research. We believe this decentralized approach breaks many barriers for patients to participate in research including geographic, socio-economic and structural barriers.
How do you think the technology behind xCures can address this?
There are several key features of the technology that is particularly important to make the platform work:
· We have the capability to access a patient’s entire medical record across multiple providers and systems and aggregate it in one place. We then structure this data, including the critical information contained in unstructured text such as clinic, pathology, or radiology notes and impressions. This process is all completed in a “regulatory grade” system, so the data is validated and suitable for answering formal research questions.
· We use the same data system and natural language processing (NLP) in collaboration with discussions with the leading experts to create a living catalog of treatment options, including both approved and investigational options. This gives us a way to organize the potential choices for patients and apply our AI-powered recommender engine to prioritize options for them and their doctors to consider. The output is now personalized and immediately relevant to the patient’s situation.
· Lastly, we learn throughout the process, whether that is improving our NLP, discovering new options, or observing real-world outcomes. This is captured in our language and predictive models and constantly refined. We think this continuous learning has the potential to identify what options should be pursued and further validated vs. those that should be abandoned accelerating finding the best cancer treatments.
· Continuous learning
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause and getting involved?
I have worked at the intersection of life sciences, computational technologies, and business for my whole career. Most of the early part of my career was focused on the application of technology in the context of very explicit business goals. Over time I became more and more aware of the impact that access to care and the care quality has on people’s lives. I often heard about the importance of being patient-centric and when I understood that xCures would deliver valuable services directly to patients and their doctors I got excited. We can help people, accelerate our understanding of treatments and advance our technology all in one platform.
How do you think this might change the world?
New cancer treatments are consistently being introduced but the time frame for discovering them and optimizing their use is very long. Through continuous real-time learning, we can dramatically shorten the time it will take to understand what works and share the knowledge with those who need it. This type of system will be applied to many other diseases rapidly accelerating our collective understanding of how to treat serious illnesses.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
One of the primary considerations for being able to apply the type of system xCures has built is access to the interventions that are suggested. Many people don’t have access to some interventions because of the many barriers and disparities that exist across our healthcare system. If these access barriers are not addressed there is a risk that these systems will lead to greater inequity as those with the means to access novel approaches pursue them. The silver lining of this is that the system will highlight these inequities and make them easier to identify and address.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1.) Understand the problem that you are trying to solve as wholly as possible. Don’t just focus on the point solution but make sure you understand the whole product solution. For example, early in our thinking at xCures we were focused on identifying clinical trials for patients only to realize that less than 5% of patients were able to pursue these options. This made us realize we had to think much more broadly about treatment options for advanced cancer.
2.) Develop clear measures that you will use to understand if you are really making a difference. If you can’t measure something, it will be impossible to gauge your progress. Our largest investment to date has been in collecting regulatory grade outcomes by structuring a patient’s medical records throughout their entire journey. Without this, we wouldn’t be able to understand or learn from our process.
3.) Make sure the team understands the mission and has the skills and agency to develop the solutions. Everyone on your team needs to know what the task at hand is. At the same time, the team members need the freedom to apply their skills and experience without being overly constrained. Our biggest breakthroughs in developing our AI-powered recommender engine have come from our analytics team having the freedom to pursue new approaches based on their collective experience.
4.) Make sure your investors and supporters understand the commitment they are making and are going to support the team through. Many companies, including xCures, will find themselves in difficult circumstances. Mentorship and investors willing to support the mission are critical to staying the course.
5.) Get your solution into the hands of the users and customers as quickly as possible. Don’t develop solutions that aren’t immediately needed. The most impactful events for our team have come from working directly with patients. Even if we were innovating on the fly, we could always ground ourselves in doing what was best for the people using our tools in the real world.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
When you find ways to combine positive impact with a successful business, the long-term rewards and connections are much greater. This is because of the “network effects” of doing good. Influential people want to align themselves and be affiliated with high-impact projects. Sometimes the returns may be smaller in the short term but the long play is always more substantive.
Is there a person in the world, or in the U.S. with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?
Yuval Noah Harari is the author of several books. In particular, I find his views as they are expressed in “Homo Deus” very interesting. The book can be somewhat unsettling at times, but I think it addresses the convergence of biology, computer science, and society in a very thoughtful way. I would find it very interesting to spend time with Prof. Harari to discuss how he sees the further integration of these subjects.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikanewton/ and you can follow xCures at
· https://www.linkedin.com/company/xcures
· https://www.facebook.com/xcures.platform
· https://www.instagram.com/xcures.platform/
· xCures also sponsors a podcast on YouTube about big ideas in cancer which can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/c/TargetCancer
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Mika Newton of xCures On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.