My name is Jorge.

I started Kanteron Systems, a medical imaging open-source software company, in Valencia (Spain) in 2005.

In 2011 I moved to New York to open our US subsidiary. While living in New York, I started dating a woman that was battling breast cancer. Her name is Stephanie.

Stephanie and Jorge in New York

Stephanie’s oncologist was at Beth Israel Cancer Center, her surgeon at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital, and her radiation therapist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

As I held her hand through the process twice (she had surgery, and a recurrence a year later) and met with her doctors, I saw first-hand how broken many cancer-care processes involving data and medical imaging sharing were.

For example:

Tumor samples transported from Mount Sinai to MSKCC by courier, taking weeks and many forms

The oncologist not having access to the tissue samples or images

Test being repeated because they could not be found

Reports faxed several times (yes, faxed!) because they could not be read

Measurements done with a ruler on a printed image and written down in pencil on a post-it

Genetic tests only for tumors, not patients, and only for 3 genetic traits (estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and HER2)

No unequivocal or automatic recurrence checking or incidental findings

No mechanism in place to check for adverse medication prevention or genomic screening for optimized medication result

A major anomaly in a medical image missed by several radiologist, only detected when we physically took a CD with the images to another physician for review

Her case was complicated by an unusual reaction to an ineffective medication. According to research, up to 75% of some cancer cases fit that pattern. The most likely cause: a genomic variant interfering with the prescribed medication. With existing systems it would take months, and a lot of money, to test that hypothesis.

Something had to be done about it, and I was not going to sit and wait for somebody else to do it.

I wanted to put together the “missing pieces” to solve the puzzle to help her, and millions of other patients like her. So I had to design a new technological platform working with my tireless developers to add many “new components” to our existing radiology imaging solution (known as PACS-RIS), like:

How did we tackle such a monumental task?

First, I went back to school. My 6 years of medical imaging experience, business, and computer degrees were not enough. Since I am not an MD, I was only admitted into a postgraduate clinical genomics program due to my determination. Seeing the love of your life fade before your eyes is indeed one strong motivation. I ended up not only graduating with top grades but also learning enough to understand how complex what I wanted to achieve was! I even persuaded my genomics professor to join my company as an advisor.

Being an open-source company meant we did not have to re-invent the wheel for everything. Fellow domain expert alumni at MIT, Oxford, and Harvard helped fill in the knowledge gaps. But even so, we had to develop a lot of new code and algorithms make of all the “components” mentioned above work.

Two years and a million lines of code later, we finished the software and called TMIS (Translational Medical InformationServer) — the first and only integrated personalized medicine system in the world.