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The pain of a cancer diagnosis affects us all at some point, either directly or through someone close to us. But care options can be difficult to understand if you’re a patient, and hard to keep up with if you’re an oncologist.

Gena Health is building a solution to this problem based on the CEO’s personal experience. Read on to find out more.

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Gena Health wants to help clinicians and patients navigate the fragmented cancer care landscape

It’s a familiar tale in the media: someone in dire need hopes to get a form of healthcare treatment their regular provider can’t offer or doesn’t know about.

Understanding their options or obtaining the care they want can be a struggle at a time when they’re not physically and mentally best prepared for it.

This is something Skomer Bennett-Clemmow understands from personal experience.

“My mum was diagnosed with a terminal form of brain cancer called glioblastoma back in 2019. We found ourselves going through the NHS and the standard care treatments, and exhausting them. We then had to identify and navigate a variety of different treatment options outside the NHS for ourselves, advocating for ourselves,” he says.

“Through that approach, we probably extended her life by a full year, which is pretty significant, because the average for her disease is about 14 months. So we learned a huge amount about the issues and the deep fragmentation that we see in the healthcare space.”

It’s from this experience that Gena Health was born, promising to let patients and clinicians “explore treatment options in minutes, not months.” Bennett-Clemmow is co-founder and CEO at the startup.

“We're really trying to solve that very deep fragmentation and cognitive overload problem that oncologists face in the precision cancer care space. That's partly because they face a rapidly evolving set of therapies, trials, off-label options, diagnostic guidelines, and all that information is very inconsistent, disparate, and very time-consuming to go through,” he explains.

How it works

Gena Health’s Gena Orbit product allows oncologists to explore the available treatment options for a particular patient in granular detail and then invite the patient to the platform to see what is available.

The oncologist can then make referrals for treatments and clinical trials directly through the platform. Bennett-Clemmow says that as oncologists tend to be very busy, the idea is to make everything as integrated and seamless as possible.

Of course, this approach is not much use if the available data isn’t up to scratch. And that’s a core priority for Bennett-Clemmow and his fellow co-founder Rob Ballantine.

In addition to ensuring the data they have is up-to-date and accurate, they say they’re putting a lot of work into finding and curating oncologists who are conducting trials and looking for patients to take part.

“Skomer spoke to an oncologist in the US the other day who has seven minutes per patient. Let's make that time as valuable as possible. These are really high-leverage episodic moments in a patient's care journey when they want to understand what next, and we want to solve for that immediate pain and make it better,” Ballantine says.

The story so far

Following Bennett-Clemmow’s family experience with cancer care, he did a master’s degree inspired by his mother’s care. Ballantine was a friend who managed an NHS programme to improve care pathways, and Bennett-Clemmow interviewed him as an expert for his research.

The pair realised they wanted to address the fragmented cancer care landscape and they began to collaborate in their spare time, researching what would become Gena Health.

“From the start of Q4 2024, we've really been pedal-down on this to the point of building out the team, hiring a CTO, hiring a clinical lead, developing the product, raising money as we go and really figuring out how we tackle this,” Ballantine says.

This year they aim to build out a userbase of oncologists and patients.

While Gena Health eventually wants to serve the NHS, they’re beginning with selling to individual oncologists in the UK private sector, which is more of a straightforward sales process for a pre-seed startup. In the US, the healthcare model there has led them to start selling to hospitals, and Bennett-Clemmow says they’re already talking to significant hospital groups.

“We want to delight oncologists, to demonstrate real value and ROI, to increase the number of cancer indications that we can support, to start to build out diagnostic capabilities, to deepen the value that we can deliver through the platform, and to have launched both in the UK and the US. I think if we can do that, we'll be in a good spot,” Ballantine says.

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