Wicks ‘lights the way’ for Sano Genetics in global personalised medicines push
Wicks will spearhead ‘Light The Way’, a pivotal programme with ambitious global expansion plans for families affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/motor neurone disease (ALS/MND).
Dr Wicks is a neuropsychologist who has worked in the field of ALS (also known as MND) research for 22 years. As Business Weekly recently reported, the company started 2024 by securing new funding of $11.4 million to bring the total raised to date to more than $22m.
Founded in 2017 by three Cambridge PhD students, Sano says it is experiencing huge demand for its technology and its client roster now includes four of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies as well as research organisations, biotechs and patient advocacy groups.
For the past five years, Wicks has been an independent scientific adviser in digital health, clinical trials, rare disease and patient centricity for Sano and other companies including Ada Health, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Woebot and The Wellcome Trust.
Before starting his consultancy, Dr Wicks led the R & D team at PatientsLikeMe, a personalised health network for people living with a variety of medical conditions, and worked at the Institute of Psychiatry (King’s College London) studying cognition and neuroimaging in ALS/MND.
He gained a postdoc in psychological consequences of Parkinson’s disease and in 2011 was awarded MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Humanitarian of the Year award.
The ‘Light the Way’ programme he will now be leading for Sano offers peer support, DNA testing, genetic counselling, education and research access to those diagnosed with or experiencing symptoms of ALS/MND, and those at risk of genetic ALS/MND.
As well as providing much-needed resources for a typically overlooked population, a major focus for Dr Wicks with Light the Way will be building equitable, sustainable and transparent funding partnerships with key stakeholders to drive the programme beyond proof of concept and maximise its impact for patients and their families.
He says: “It's been such a pleasure watching Sano grow from six people to 70+ and I have been consistently impressed by the positivity, brilliance and collaborative spirit that starts with the co-founders and cascades to every level of the team. It is energising to spend your time working on meaningful challenges, and I can't wait to get started.
“Light The Way is a truly pivotal programme. During my PhD, I scoured the country for people with ALS who had inherited a genetic cause for their disease but, despite support from the UK's leading ALS centres, I found just seven patients to take part in my research.
“Today, Sano can quickly deliver samples of genetically-characterised participants to take part in clinical trials, observational studies and support programmes around the world. I just wish these tools had been available back then as we could have moved much further and faster.
“Sadly, ALS is still a rapidly progressive and fatal disease, but today I am more hopeful than ever that we are on the cusp of a new era of precision medicine approaches, particularly with the recent approval of an antisense oligonucleotide called Tofersen in the US for patients with ALS carrying a SOD1 mutation.
“Ultimately, we will be looking to expand Light The Way’s reach beyond the US and the UK, especially into countries that lack genetic testing infrastructure, and where an absence of high-quality care and support for ALS patients and their families are the status quo.
“The Sano platform can deploy in multiple languages and geographies which gives us the potential to close inequity gaps that have existed for too long.”
