Cancer screening still faces major hurdles in accuracy, cost, and timing. Too often, patients receive diagnoses after it’s already too late for the most effective treatment. While the healthcare industry continues to pour resources into therapeutics, early detection remains underfunded, despite its power to save lives. Frederic Scheer, founder of ALERCELL, is determined to change that. His mission is both professional and deeply personal. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He survived, and that experience gave him a new sense of purpose: to transform how we detect cancer early and give patients a better chance to fight back.
A Personal Mission Born from Experience
Frederic’s approach to cancer detection comes from a deeply personal place. “Eight years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer at stage four,” he shares. “I had to fight my way out. I went through radiation, chemotherapy, you name it. I am now in remission after eight years of fighting.” That experience shaped his conviction that early detection can save lives and spare others the grueling treatments he endured. Through his company, ALERCELL, Frederic is working to detect cancer in its earliest stages, sometimes years before symptoms appear. “We have certain tests for a type of cancer called non-small cell lung cancer that can detect methylation as early as 41 months before clinical symptoms,” he explains. This approach stands in stark contrast to traditional diagnostics, which often identify cancer only after it has already progressed.
Why Early Detection Hasn’t Taken Off
The healthcare industry’s priorities explain much of the problem. “If you look at the healthcare industry in general, 85% of the money is going toward therapeutics and diagnostics are basically of little interest,” Frederic points out. “The money is in therapeutics; the money is not in diagnostics. And the healthcare industry has forgotten that patient should be at the center of the industry.” He sees a fundamental misalignment in priorities. “We have lost the concept that healthcare should be patient-centric, and it is not patient-centric. Big Pharma is working for its shareholders and working for its bottom line,” he observes. “My personal history makes me patient-centric, and that’s important to me.”
Prioritizing Accuracy Over Volume
While competitors chase broad-spectrum testing, ALERCELL focuses on accuracy over quantity. Frederic criticizes multi-cancer detection approaches: “There’s a company able to test up to 51 cancers. The problem with this is that the tests become what I call a triage type of testing.” The accuracy numbers tell the story. “What is the specificity, what is the sensitivity of the test? And those numbers are disappointing. They go as low as 15%, as high as 50%,” he explains. “If I tell you, well, you have one chance out of two of getting cancer, what’s the point?” ALERCELL takes a different path. “The approach that we have at ALERCELL is totally different. We go toward very precise types of analysis, and we have reduced the number of cancers on which we can work,” Frederic says. Their focus on leukemia and blood cancers allows for much higher accuracy.
Developing ALERCELL’s Core Tech
ALERCELL’s technology centers on what Frederic calls “the deep leukemic cloud platform” with four key components. The Lena code analyzes clinical information, while their epigenetic clock tracks genetic changes over time. “We’re working on 205 genes. When we do that analysis for every single gene, we are able to do that in a matter of hours, I mean less than two hours because of artificial intelligence,” he explains. The results speak volumes. “We have done clinical studies and so far, we have extremely good results. We are in the mid 90%, 95, 97% accuracy,” he reports. “The clinician will feel very confident. And I think that the patient will feel confident as well in the results.”
Using AI for Blood-Based Screening
Unlike invasive procedures, ALERCELL’s approach requires minimal patient discomfort. “All those genomic approaches that we have are based on blood tests (Liquid biopsy). We’re not talking about tissue biopsy which remains painful and sometimes dangerous. It’s just a simple blood test,” Frederic notes. From that small blood sample, artificial intelligence analyzes massive amounts of genetic data. “It’s billions of information that artificial intelligence is able to analyze,” he explains. This comprehensive approach examines DNA, RNA, and proteins for a complete picture.
He envisions routine genetic screening becoming standard healthcare. “I believe that in the future of medicine we will be able to do that at as early an age as possible, which will give us a genome map of children,” he predicts. Regular monitoring could catch problems decades before they become dangerous. ALERCELL is currently raising $2 million in seed funding to expand their platform. “We need funding obviously because these types of research are expensive. But we can see a lot of interest from a lot of companies and a lot of investors,” he says. “Everyone is touched by cancer.”
The company plans to extend their precise approach to breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer in the future. For Frederic, the mission remains personal: preventing others from facing what he endured. His combination of technical expertise and lived experience positions ALERCELL to change how we think about cancer screening entirely.
Follow Frederic Scheer on LinkedIn for deeper insights into the future of early cancer detection and precision diagnostics.
