Sesh is committed to improving care for cancer patients. The newest paradigm in
healthcare is precision medicine, whereby each patient is given the right treatment
at the right time. This strategy leads to the best outcome. In oncology, there are
many different types of treatment - from chemo, radiation, and surgery to targeted
inhibitors and immunotherapy. Sesh operates at the forefront of medicine, applying
a precision oncology approach to the newest and most promising type of cancer
therapy, immunotherapy.

 

Our technology, RELOAD, allows each cancer patient and their oncology team to
determine whether immunotherapy is the optimal type of treatment at a given time.
For many patients, immunotherapy is indeed the best option, but other patients may
be unlikely to benefit from immunotherapy due to biomarkers that prevent
immunotherapy from being effective. RELOAD measures the presence of these

biomarkers, so that informed treatment decisions can be made. Making treatment
decisions utilizing the information from RELOAD can save a patient's life.

 

Sesh is taking RELOAD from its humble beginnings as nothing more than a concept
to widespread clinical usage, so that it can help patients. The journey began in a lab
at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) when one of our founders, Dr. Andrew Sinkoe,
was having a conversation with two of his colleagues about predicting response to
immunotherapy before a patient is treated. (These two colleagues, and Dr. Sinkoe,
went on to become co-inventors of the biomarker test that Sesh has named
RELOAD.)

 

About a year after that conversation, Dr. Sinkoe was working from home during the
Covid-19 pandemic and had the idea to dedicate himself to developing a test that
can determine whether immunotherapy is right for a patient. That is the moment
Sesh began; that was in August 2020.

 

Dr. Sinkoe was fortunate enough to gain support from colleagues and mentors at
NCI, who helped him obtain samples from cancer patients so that he could develop
the test and evaluate its performance on real data from cancer patients. NCI also
supported Dr. Sinkoe by awarding him a Transition to Industry (T2I) Fellowship
that provided him 2 years (2022 and 2023) where he could work full-time on
developing the test with collaborators at NCI. The results from evaluating the test on
patient data were promising, and NCI filed an international patent application in
January 2023. NCI went on to continue supporting Dr. Sinkoe's research on the test
through their Invention Development Program (IDP) in 2023.

 

Sesh will be licensing the technology from NCI, to bring it to patients and
oncologists. None of this would have been possible without the support of NCI and
also the support of Dr. Sinkoe's business team and co-founders. While
Dr. Sinkoe was developing the technology and scientific commercialization aspects
with his NCI team, Sesh's business team was helping Dr. Sinkoe with market
analysis, legal requirements for incorporating Sesh as a company, and putting
together mission-critical materials such as the pitch deck and business plan, as well
as this website. The business team also helped in an advisory capacity, helping 

Dr. Sinkoe make difficult decisions both scientifically and business-wise.

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Today, at the time of writing this (February 10th, 2024), Sesh is gearing up to
officially incorporate, and the team is raising investment capital from family, friends,
and venture capital investors. We will start the company officially in April, license
the technology from NCI, and continue executing our commercialization strategy. It
has been quite a journey to get to this point, and we know it is just the beginning.
We feel we have a responsibility to help cancer patients, and we are dedicating our
lives to this mission.