Oakland startup taps demand for help unlocking secrets of pancreatic disease
David Clement Whitcomb, the oldest of four children, flunked kindergarten, suffered through grade school and was told by a high school guidance counselor that a landscaping career would be a good idea because he was not college material.
But the Warsaw, Ind., native overcame his childhood dyslexia to become a tenured physician researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and a pioneer in using genetics, reverse engineering and machine learning to unlock the secrets of pancreatic disease. Now, he says he’s ready to challenge a cornerstone of modern medicine.
“We’ve cracked the code and built a system that for the first time that can manage one of these complex inflammatory diseases at a fundamental level,” the 61-year-old Dr. Whitcomb said.
The noted specialist in pancreatic disease is the founder and medical advisory board chairman at Ariel Precision Medicine, a 2-yearold startup based in Oakland that has received $1 million in investment funding. Dr. Whitcomb’s daughter, Jessica Gibson, is Ariel CEO.
Ariel has taken an engineering approach to understanding inflammatory pancreatic disease — an irreversible ailment that can be difficult to diagnose and treat, often heralding a lifetime of belly pain and frustration.
Using a saliva sample, Ariel performs genetic testing to determine the malformations causing the patient’s problem. Then it matches the results with symptoms and exposure to environmental triggers to help doctors better understand the disease and treatment options.
Machine learning is used for analysis of the patient data with each report tailored to the
individual.
“It’s allowing doctors to be more efficient,” said Ms. Gibson, 35, a McCandless native who lives in Orange County, Calif. “It’s providing the tools to support them.”
After a soft launch this summer of its physician consulting business, Ariel is generating revenue and better still, testing is partly covered by patients’ health insurance, she said.
Ms. Gibson is an emergency medicine graduate from the University of Pittsburgh, where she trained to be a paramedic. She also received an executive MBA and has laboratory, clinical and biotechnology experience.
Pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas, often is misdiagnosed, sometimes leaving doctors at their wits end about how to treat the problem.
At Ariel, treatment begins with challenging a pillar of medical education called germ theory, which teaches doctors that diseases are caused by specific micro-organisms. Since the idea evolved from the late 1800s, doctors have been taught to focus on whatever agent might be causing a medical problem, Dr. Whitcomb said, which is fine when you’re talking about cholera-contaminated wells or pneumonia.
But the theory has fostered misunderstandings about chronic pancreatitis — that the disease is caused by a single microorganism, which is not true. Doctors also have been quick to blame heavy alcohol consumption or cigarette smoking, which is not always the case.
As a first-year gastrointestinal fellow at Duke University, he evaluated two older ladies for abdominal pain of unknown origin. He discussed his findings with his physician mentor, who immediately concluded they had alcoholic chronic pancreatitis.
Dr. Whitcomb disagreed. His mentor shot back, “Do not throw your career away working on chronic pancreatitis. It is a hopeless disorder.”
“I returned to the exam room,” he wrote in an essay marking receipt of the George E. Palade Medal Award in 2015, the highest honor awarded by the International Association of Pancreatology. “As these patients focused their eyes on me, I could clearly see two righteous women who suffered greatly from both a terrible disease and from an obstinate medical community that believed they were just secret alcoholics.”
The truth, Dr. Whitcomb soon discovered, is that the germ theory of disease doesn’t work for any number of problems that cause inflammation without infection, including chronic pancreatitis.
For these problems, he turned to reverse engineering, or tracking the disease backward from analysis of the genes involved. That became the basis for the company.
Pancreatic disease describes several conditions, with pancreatic cancer being the most serious. Two million new cases of pancreatic disease are diagnosed annually at a cost to the health care system of $250 billion, according to Ariel.
Ariel employs 10 people, including independent contractors, and has received funding from Innovation Works, Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse and an array of other investors.
The company has consulted with doctors at medical centers, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities. Online results are available to referring physicians through a secure link.
“All doctors are trained in the germ theory of disease,” Dr. Whitcomb said. “All research, all textbooks, all data organizations, everybody has been completely involved in the germ theory of disease.”
“My role is best served as a researcher,” he said, “changing the textbooks, policies.”