In Conversation with Cyriac Roeding

In Conversation provides a glimpse into the life of an ‘outlier’ — an exceptional person going above and beyond to improve outcomes in their field.

Cyriac Roeding, a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor, sold his first computer program at the age of 15 in Germany.

Thirty-four years later, he has built three companies and is an investor in more than 20 startups and venture funds. Cyriac is the co-founder and CEO of Earli, a biotech company on a mission to detect and cure cancer early.

After selling Shopkick, a location-based mobile app that rewards customers just for walking into stores without having to buy anything, to South Korean conglomerate SK Telecom for $250 million in 2014, Cyriac wanted to take two years off work. Six months in, he became unhappy because he “felt useless”. That’s when he decided he’s never going to retire again and began the quest for his next adventure.

“My mind would have sent me to e-commerce or mobile commerce again, but my heart directed me to science. I’m not a scientist or a biologist but I love science and I just observed myself — what I was reading; what I was interested in… When I didn’t have anything to do, I’d read about the latest science breakthroughs,” Cyriac said.

From brain-to-machine interfaces to consumer robots to “engineering meets biology and software”, Cyriac looked at around 200 ideas before finalising his next big business venture. He found the intersection of engineering and biology particularly intriguing. The next 20–30 years will be the age of biology, not in a traditional way but rather the combination of wet lab with dry lab of engineering and biology, according to Cyriac. “Since I happened to live five miles from Stanford campus, I started stumbling around the campus and wanted to meet all those interesting people. I did meet a lot of interesting people, but the problem was that every single one told me that they were working on the world’s most important idea,” Cyriac said.

With limited industry-specific knowledge, Cyriac couldn’t differentiate between a good idea, a very good idea and an outstanding idea. “There is an ocean of good ideas but there are very few outstanding ideas,” he said. On Thanksgiving Day in 2016, Cyriac’s wife showed him an article on precision medicine in Stanford Medicine magazine. It was about an American physician-scientist Sam Gambhir (23 Nov 1962–18 Jul 2020), whose only child died of cancer, and about his work to find cancer early. Cyriac felt a gripping sense of grief and was immensely inspired by Sam’s work. He contacted Sam and told him that “I’m not a biologist, not a scientist but I’m a serial entrepreneur looking to build my next thing and that I would like to meet him.” Two months later, they met for breakfast on a Saturday morning.

“My first question to him (Sam) was — should someone with my background, or lack thereof, bother the world of biology with my presence,” Cyriac said. Sam encouraged Cyriac to take the plunge. The field of biology, suggested Sam, had a lot of experts but it needed more generalists — people who understood how to set up a company and run a business. Sam shared the idea about synthetic biomarkers, forcing the cancer to produce a non-human substance to help reveal, then localise and ultimate destroy itself. Cyriac was fascinated and they soon started on a shared journey to make cancer a benign experience. In the early days, Cyriac would often find himself sitting at Sam’s kitchen table trying to understand the nuts and bolts of synthetic biology.

Sam and Cyriac went through hundreds of people to find the right third co-founder and chief scientific officer. That became David Suhy, a gene therapy and bio startup expert with experience taking a gene therapy product all the way from inception to Phase 2 clinical trials. Earli was born in June 2018 and moved into its first lab space in South San Francisco a month later. David has been leading the science ever since. Unfortunately, Sam passed away in 2020 from a tumour of unknown origin but Cyriac and team continue to stay determined to carry on Sam’s vision and mission.

In 2018, the founders had set an ambitious goal to begin human trials within three years. At the time, the investors weren’t convinced and had chuckled. “This kind of pace is typically unheard of in the biotech industry, but just three years and two weeks after Earli was founded — the first patient was dosed with Earli’s Synthetic Biopsy compound,” Cyriac said.

The company’s human trials for cancer detection are being conducted in Australia at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse (Sydney), the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Centre (Melbourne), at PASO (Frankston) and ICON Cancer Centre (Adelaide).

Earli needs 12–20 patients for trial but recruitment is particularly challenging because it is a diagnostic trial that offers no direct medical benefit to the patient, which means participation is based on altruism. COVID-19 and lockdowns only exacerbated these recruitment challenges.

We all know the road to commercialisation is fraught with hurdles and pitfalls, so what makes Earli different from other ambitious cancer detection biotech companies?

“The difference is we are not searching for cancer, we are forcing the cancer to make itself visible. And by doing so we might have a better shot at actually finding it early, because if you are searching for something that is shed by the cancer, like a liquid biopsy, then you are depending on what nature may not always provide to you. Instead, what if you could actually control the system and engineer your way forward, so that cancer is required to produce something it doesn’t want to produce and thereby makes itself visible. It is a fundamentally different question, whether you are trying to search for cancer or whether you are forcing the cancer to reveal itself,” Cyriac said.

Unlike other companies, we use biology for this, not chemistry, which allows for massive signal amplification, said Cyriac, adding that the same technique also “allows us to ultimately destroy the cancer”.

While it’s still early days for the technology, Earli is hoping to be ready for the market by 2026.

Cyriac Roeding, CEO and Co-founder, Earli and Dr Andrew Scott,  Head, Tumour Targeting Program; Head, Tumour Targeting Laboratory, Director, Department of Molecular Imaging and Therapy, Austin Health, at Olivia Newton-John Cancer Centre. Image: Supplied.