In 2024, Sid Sijbrandij got the news that no cancer patient wants to hear: his tumor was back and his doctors had nothing left to suggest.
Sid, a tech entrepreneur who up until that point had been running his company, GitLab, went all in, doing as much testing and as many treatments as he could.
It seems to have worked. Moreover, Sid’s team thinks they’ve been able to figure out what went right, thanks to heaps of molecular data they’ve collected, including single-cell sequencing data.
“It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to do causative work in an N-of-1 study, but because we have this longitudinal sampling over the course of Sid’s case, we can start to build a mechanistic hypothesis,” said Jacob Stern, a single-cell data expert and veteran of 10x Genomics who found his way onto Sid’s team. “Which seems to be that there was a bunch of combination immunotherapy that helped to rev up the immune system over the course of 2024.”
Join Sid, Jacob, and me as we discuss the “maximal diagnostics” approach and how Sid plans to bring it to other patients who find themselves in a similar situation.
You can also listen to the interview on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
During our chat, Sid mentions that he got a treatment from a company started by a friend he made at the Y Combinator startup accelerator. That company is Shasqi, founded by José Oneto.
To see a timeline of Sid’s experience and all the data he and his team collected diagnosing and treating his disease check out osteosarc.com.
Sid has also written about his experience on his personal Substack:
For more information about Sid’s policy proposals, check out slide 17 of his embedded PowerPoint at https://sytse.com/cancer/
For more information about the cancer “playbooks” offered by the Sijbrandij Foundation’s Future of Cancer Care Today program, see: https://sijbrandijfoundation.org/fcct
More information about the companies Sid is investing in to bring aspects of his maximal diagnostics approach to market is at Evenone.ventures.
