Cleancard
Making cancer screening as easy as a pregnancy test
We are combining synthetic biology and artificial intelligence to make cancer screening as easy as a pregnancy test. Cleancard is bringing lab-grade diagnostics into the comfort of your home. Our novel method enables robust diagnostics and biomarker tracking from the urine in just 30 minutes. Our rapid at-home screens can identify prostate, bladder and ovarian cancers. We are constantly expanding the number of conditions we can detect from a single sample using our platform technology.
Active Founders
Luca Springer
Luca is an expert in network science and computational game theory. He also has a strong policy background with a focus on healthcare systems. Luca previously worked at Stockdale Street, where he gathered years of experience analyzing, investing in, and helping grow healthcare, consumer, and technology companies. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Global Governance from the University of Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Luca is a Schmidt Futures ISF Fellow.
Thomas Carroll
Clinical cancer researcher with a specialty in bioinformatics, biomarkers, and methods development. Passionate about building better diagnostics and putting a dent in cancer mortality.
Company Launches
Tl;dr: We’re Cleancard, a pair of Rhodes Scholars on a mission to reinvent cancer diagnostics. We combine synthetic biology + AI to create powerful at-home cancer tests, with results from urine in just 30 minutes. Check out our website for more!
Hey everyone - we’re Tom and Luca, the co-founders behind Cleancard!
👨🏻 Tom: Clinical cancer researcher, expert in bioinformatics and methods development. No stranger to designing better biomarker tests. 👨🏻🦰 Luca: Computer scientist with a strong healthcare policy background. Years of experience growing healthtech and consumer businesses.
Early cancer detection saves lives 🕑
More than 18M Americans have cancer today. Unfortunately, this is a growth market (26M projected by 2040). 1 in 3 have a close family member with a history of cancer, and thus have a higher risk for cancer themselves (2x). We know these realities all too well from our personal lives, dealing with hereditary cancer syndromes and family histories of cancer.
Cancer will come for many of us. To give ourselves drastically better odds of surviving this disease, we need to diagnose it before it reaches an advanced stage.
Problem: Cancer screening is failing us 🤬
- Cancer symptoms are often unnoticeable until the cancer is too advanced to cure
- Current lab-based screening tests are time-consuming and costly - they fail to get people to screen before they are symptomatic (even for PSA, only 1 in 3 participate)
- At-home rapid tests would increase rates of asymptomatic screening but just don’t perform well enough to be trusted for cancer diagnostics
- Current options are not sufficient to give people their best chance at surviving cancer
Solution: Cleancard’s rapid testing platform 😍
We’ve built a new rapid-test method enabling highly sensitive biomarker-guided diagnostics from the urine in just 30 minutes. Key advantages of our proprietary technology:
- 10x quicker/cheaper than lab-based tests
- 10x more sensitive than lateral flow
- No expensive machinery or complicated sample manipulation.
See how we stack up:
Cleancard technology combines synthetic biology, machine learning, and computer vision into a multiplexable, machine-readable format which allows us to detect multiple cancer biomarkers from a single sample.
Our first rapid at-home screens will identify prostate, bladder, and ovarian cancers. Our method is highly agile - we’ve successfully targeted 10 new cancer biomarkers during this YC batch alone, with more to come soon.
Cleancard’s platform is the one-stop shop for reliable detection and tracking of multiple cancer biomarkers in the comfort of your own home.
Our asks 🙏
- Share this post! Please help us spread the word with your networks.
- Join our team! We are always looking for highly motivated scientists and engineers to join us in our mission to reinvent cancer diagnostics. If that’s you or someone you know, please get in touch (contact@cleancard.bio).