Elizabeth Cormier-May: Leading the Path of Early & Safe Diagnosis

Elizabeth Cormier-May | Mammogen - Early & Safe Diagnosis | CIO Women Magazine

Women have been long under-represented in the healthcare sector. , Elizabeth Cormier-May plans to change that by radically improving the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of women’s health-related diseases. While Elizabeth Cormier leads Mammogen as the CEO, she’s also the Senior VP and Chief Commercial Officer of IV BioHoldings (IVBH), working alongside her partner IVBH Founder & CEO Martin Keiser. With her vision, she plans to make early & safe diagnoses of women-related diseases more of an everyday reality. 

Featured in this issue of CIO Women is Elizabeth Cormier-May, The Most Influential Women To Watch in 2022.

Leading the Way- Mammogen

Elizabeth Cormier-May began her career as a medicinal chemist specializing in early discovery oncology at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research. She left the lab because she felt too far away from the patient. Instead, Elizabeth Cormier-May wanted to bring tangible, meaningful change to the healthcare journey. For almost 20 years she’s been developing new markets, products, and companies — with one goal: to introduce novel options and technologies that enhance patient experiences and save lives. 

For women whose lives have been affected by female cancers, every new day comes with a fear that it may return. Elizabeth Cormier aims to close the gap between science and support by starting a new conversation about the fears, anxieties, depression, marital challenges, and body shame issues that go hand in hand with breast cancer. At the same time, Elizabeth Cormier-May plans to form a strong new community with the power to make a real difference.

Her Key Achievements:

For Elizabeth Cormier-May, success is defined by building not just a company or suite of companies, but a self-funding ecosystem that simultaneously empowers physicians with best-in-class products, patients with data-driven tools that unlock self and healthcare learning along with passive revenue, and partners that help to decentralize care so that anyone can access and afford care without the delays and hurdles of the current system. And, yes, this is possible. According to her, the construction of such an ecosystem has already begun.

Building an Efficient Team-

“I would say that the Golden Rule applies here.”

To lead a team to a successful tomorrow requires every ounce of leadership, but more importantly, it requires one to be constantly humble and respectful. A rule of thumb Elizabeth Cormier-May swears by is treating others the same way you want to be treated. 

Elizabeth Cormier-May does her best to create an environment of transparency and respect. Elizabeth Cormier-May also insists on holding people accountable, herself included. This means that not every conversation is easy. In those moments, Elizabeth Cormier focuses on respect and always brings it back to their larger goal. According to Elizabeth, 

“If everyone doesn’t commit to our mission, then women will continue to die from a disease process that we could have changed.”

Words Of Encouragement For Budding Entrepreneurs? 

For anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur, Elizabeth’s most important piece of advice is to dream big and listen to your gut. If you know you can execute an idea or innovation, then do NOT let others tell you that you cannot. Devise your plan, surround yourself with people who believe in you and your vision, and DO NOT QUIT! 

“Expect failure, expect No’s, expect others’ doubt in your ability or idea, and use all of those things to fuel your passion and to make you work smarter to prove them wrong.”

How the Healthcare Industry is Taking a New Shape with Digitization-

Like many other industries, digitization is also moving to a more central position in the healthcare industry — as well as a far more prominent position within the daily focus on the average consumer. From the nearly 1 billion people utilizing wearables as part of their journey to the vast integration of telehealth, our industry needs to adapt to this new “normal” of the digitization of patient care. 

As precision healthcare becomes increasingly more important, publicized, and funded, those who embrace digitization and create new actionable insights that were formerly unobtainable for consumers, patients, and providers will become the new leaders in this space. 

It is widely agreed upon that the genome itself does not contain enough information or predictive value to achieve populous precision health at scale, but this information — in conjunction with our daily decisions (which are routinely recorded in our wearables and apps) — is beginning to unlock paradigm-shifting value. 

By securely gathering, assembling, indexing, and analyzing the longitudinal data that we all create every moment of each day, we’re beginning to shed new light on how the traditional pieces of medicine fit together into the overall puzzle of a person’s unique health and wellness journey. Doing this in a way that eliminates the invisible line between being a patient and being a consumer is of paramount importance, and that’s exactly what Dragonfly Data Ventures (DDV) is doing. 

This, combined with shifting the business models to incite ownership over the resulting data asset for a patient/consumer, while providing engaging and incentivizing user experiences, is precisely what DDV is building. Digitization through this lens shifts how Elizabeth Cormier-May interacts with ourselves, our providers, our communities, and our technology. This is what will unlock populous precision healthcare at scale for the first time ever. 

The Company:

IV BioHoldings is a bio-platform that conceives, creates, and scales first-generation precision health solutions that radically improve the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Its novel distributed-company model is defined by speed, efficiency, and risk management. It is made possible through advanced data science, exponential technologies, powerful partnerships, and several decades of combined multi-disciplinary expertise. The current IVBH ecosystem consists of three transformative bio startups: LiquidLung, Inc.; HepGene, Inc.; and Mammogen, Inc. — focused on pulmonary disease, metabolic disease, and women’s health, respectively. The technologies in development across this family of companies comprise eight first-in-class, patented, and patent-pending noninvasive, clinical-stage diagnostics for earlier and more precise detection, diagnosis, and treatment of lung cancer, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and breast cancer. 

Since IVBH’s founding in 2018, its unique attribute has been the ability to keenly identify fail points in health standards-of-care, focusing its R&D efforts in untapped segments of the market, and quickly scaling novel innovations.

On a mission to improve the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of women-centered diseases, Mammogen is starting with its genTRU™ suite of breast diagnostics. 

The two early detection tests within this flagship program are based on 26 mRNA biomarkers. The company’s innovative multi-gene expression signatures translate to noninvasive and painless diagnostics that are poised to bring regular and accurate screening to women who are underserved by current guidelines. The genTRU™M suite of products has been validated on both blood and saliva and offers best-in-class performance. 

Ultimately, the goal is to offer every woman, regardless of their age, background, financial situation, or genetics, a chance at an early and safe diagnosis, which will potentially save millions of lives.

“Nothing we do at Mammogen is traditional; everything is, by design, inventive.”

Hurdles along the way:

Like any good CEO and entrepreneur, Elizabeth Cormier-May has failed, on some level, at nearly everything at least once.

Learning from those failures and translating them into something far more powerful and big is to Liz the most important part of success. Elizabeth’s biggest failure, however, was thinking (and actually believing) that Elizabeth Cormier needed to, or even could, handle everything on her own. She has come to an understanding that surrounding herself with people far smarter, and then acknowledging those people for their contributions, is so much more impactful than trying to handle and execute everything herself. A doing-everything-by-yourself mindset is neither sustainable nor scalable, and will always lead to ultimate failure.

“Accepting, incorporating, and celebrating the talents of others is central to success.”

Products & Services:

Mammogen is on a mission to improve the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of women’s ailments. This mission starts with its genTRU™ suite of breast diagnostics. Mammogen offers two early detection tests within its flagship program. These are based on 26 mRNA biomarkers. 

The first test is genTRU™ -EDT (Early Detection Test). This is a noninvasive, simple blood test designed specifically to get women not currently eligible for imaging scheduled for mammograms earlier and more often. This will help diagnose breast cancer at its earliest stages. 

The second is genTRU™ -PID (Post Imaging Diagnostic). This test is designed to preventwomen from having unnecessary invasive breast biopsies. The genTRU™ suite of products has been validated on both blood and saliva and offers best-in-class performance. The focus of 2022 is continuing their clinical development and getting to commercialization as quickly as possible so that early breast cancer detection becomes a reality for the 96 million women who would greatly benefit from these tests.

Mammogen’s innovative multi-gene expression signature is not only noninvasive and painless but it’s also poised to bring regular and accurate screening to women underserved by current guidelines. The technology can potentially reduce false negatives and increase early screening among women. It can also reduce false positives and allow for the safe monitoring of suspicious nodules. 

Ultimately, the goal is to offer every woman, regardless of age, background, financial situation, or genetics, a chance at early and safe diagnosis, potentially saving millions of lives, says Elizabeth Cormier-May.

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