Backing Bios Life: The intelligent OS for Cancer surveillance
Screening Is Generic. Cancer Isn’t.
More than 40% of people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, and of those, more than 30% will be diagnosed at stage 3 or 4. Despite decades of progress in treatment, screening and surveillance have stayed largely generic: guidelines sort people into broad risk buckets based on age and family history, rather than their individual biology.
The gap is widest for two groups. More than 40 million people in the US are either cancer survivors or carry an elevated cancer risk, and both groups tend to fall into a structural blind spot. As Kevin Oeffinger, Director of the Duke Cancer Institute Center for Onco-Primary Care, has put it: one in every five newly diagnosed cancers in the US is found in someone who is already a cancer survivor, and most people at elevated risk aren’t screened according to guideline standards at all. Care for these groups is fragmented across primary care and multiple specialists, and it tends to be reactive rather than proactive.
Enter BIOS Life
Ryan Richardson spent six years as Chief Strategy Officer at BioNTech, and served as Chairman of InstaDeep, BioNTech’s AI subsidiary, for three and a half years. Zach Taylor, a fellow BioNTech veteran, joins him as COO, alongside Dr. Logan Frank, a board-certified radiologist and former Director of Breast Radiology at the University of Missouri, as Chief Medical Officer. The wider team includes Geoff Hyde (previously of One Medical and Galileo) leading product and engineering, and Thomas Pierrot, formerly head of InstaDeep’s genomics AI research programme, leading BIOS Life’s AI work.
BIOS Life is building a personalised, continuous approach to cancer surveillance in place of one-off, population-based screening. Its platform combines genomic, clinical and lifestyle data into what the company describes as a “digital twin”: a model of an individual’s biology that updates over time, paired with a clinician-led virtual care team. Two programmes are live today: a personalised screening programme for people at elevated risk, and a survivorship programme for the growing population of cancer survivors who need ongoing surveillance.
BIOS Life holds commercial rights to InstaDeep’s Nucleotide Transformer, one of the most widely used genomics foundation models, and has entered a multi-year strategic alliance with Tempus (and its hereditary-testing business, Ambry Genetics) to train and validate its models on de-identified oncology data. The platform launches in the US in the second half of 2026, with a waitlist open now at bioslife.ai.
What Got Us Excited
Cancer screening and survivorship are both large markets where the standard of care is built for the average patient, not the individual in front of it. BIOS Life is building the infrastructure to close that gap, led by a team with the clinical, technical and commercial relationships (into BioNTech, InstaDeep and Tempus) to get it built and distributed quickly.
We’re excited to be backing Ryan, Zach, Logan and the whole BIOS Life team, joining Redmile Group, VSquared Ventures, Kindred Capital and the rest of the syndicate in their $25m seed round.
If you’re building something that aims to solve similarly massive challenges, I’m on max@triplepoint.vc