56. RareCan

Founders: Piers Kotting, Simon Allocca, Andy Hall and Claire Heron
Founded: 2020
Website: rarecan.com

RareCan operates on a powerful premise: aiding those with rare cancer diagnosis to find the treatment and trial options that can give them hope.

According to RareCan, which is based in the North East of England, if you are one of the 25% of patients diagnosed with a rare cancer, you are 50% more likely to die within five years than if you were diagnosed with a more common cancer. 

The reason for this is simple, if hard to digest. Rarer cancers get less attention, and are subjected to less research.

Rarecan is aiding those with rare cancer diagnosis to find the treatment and trial options that can give them hope.

Support and trials for cancers that don’t fall into the big four – lung, breast, bowel or prostate cancer – have historically been in short demand, and sufferers can find themselves with few options. 

Just as the problem is easy-to-grasp, so too is the solution. RareCan wants to offer hope to those with rare forms of cancer by utilising data to source patients for pharmaceutical companies undergoing new treatment trials.

“By bringing people with rare cancers and their data together, we are making it faster and cheaper for the global pharmaceutical industry to bring new treatments to market for rare cancer patients,” says cofounder, Piers Kotting. It’s a heady legacy for those involved, and it’s hard to argue with RareCan on the importance of the company’s work.

We are making it faster and cheaper for the global pharmaceutical industry to bring new treatments to market for rare cancer patients.

To date, RareCan has over 1,100 people with rare cancers registered within its community and has partnered with three cancer support groups, including GIST Cancer UK, Blood Cancer UK and Ovacom.

The team at RareCan has blossomed to a staff of 14 in two years, and is looking to carry on expanding in the future. With an eye on global coverage, the bigger RareCan gets, the more support it can offer to those with rare forms of cancer.  

“We created RareCan because we can reduce the number of deaths caused by rare cancers,” Kotting tells Startups. 

That’s a mission statement if we’ve ever heard one. Our judges can think of no more deserving company to be featured on the Startups 100 Index than Rarecan, a life-saving idea fixing perhaps the major public health issue of our time.