Bio :

Dr. Olcum is a co-founder of Travera, a pioneering biotechnology company in functional precision medicine in cancer. He is one of the inventors of Travera’s 2-day Rapid Therapy Guidance Test that measures the ex vivo growth response of live tumor cells to treatment. Dr. Olcum, earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Bilkent University. He has completed his post-doctoral training in Biological Engineering at MIT and served as a research scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He is a Ph.D. technologist, has co-authored over 50 papers, is an inventor of 15 issued and pending patents in bioinstrumentation, medical devices, microfluidics, sensors, micro-devices, and their biotechnology and healthcare applications.

Abstract :

Functional precision medicine offers a promising complement to genomics-based cancer therapy guidance by directly testing drug efficacy on patient tumor cells. Travera's test, delivering therapy guidance in just two days, boasts over 80% predictive accuracy across multiple cancers, tissue types and therapies. This talk details Travera's methodology, which integrates single-cell mass measurements with linked brightfield imaging, and discusses linked single-cell volume, density, and morphology and their utilization for improving the predictive accuracy and in broader single-cell data landscape.