Bhuvanesh Dave, PhD
CEO and Co-Founder, Spanios
| Dr. Dave is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spanios. The company has developed an innovative platform, Custom Organoid Modeling Platform for Accurate and Speedy Solutions (COMPASS) to enable testing drugs in pre-clinical setting utilizing patient derived tumoroids which encompass the tumor microenvironment (TME) of the patient, helping drive relevant results for development of targeted drug therapeutics. The wide-ranging, modality-agnostic bio-banked COMPASS models accelerate drug discovery with an efficacy-driven approach and functional immunity and physiological oxygenation in the context of cancer. By replicating the intricate diversity and structure of the tumor microenvironment (TME) the COMPASS models aim to reduce failures in predicting the efficacy of cancer treatment, especially in immunotherapies. Spanios operates as a hub and spoke model which include its fee for revenue services, multiple co-development partnerships and in-house pipeline, to bring new therapies to the patients. Dr. Dave has over two decades of experience in building preclinical models for oncological research and has identified novel genes and proteins critical to tumor development and treatment resistance in breast cancer. Dr. Dave has worked on identifying a novel STAT3 inhibitor that showed ability to target cancer stem cell both in vitro and in vivo human breast cancer xenograft model systems; understanding the role of PTEN in breast, endometrial and prostate cancers; and the role of mTOR in neuroendocrine tumors. Dr. Dave is very committed and passionate about providing model solutions for accelerating the discovery and validation process of the drug development pipeline particularly for rare and difficult to treat cancers. Dr. Dave believes pre-clinical testing on relevant and efficient model systems like COMPASS reduces the high failure rates at clinical and approval stage thereby reducing the cost burden and loss of valuable time in the bringing novel therapeutic options to patients. |