AC:Incubate Spotlight: Qasim Parekh, co-founder of CellaraRx

Advancements in medicine have the power to transform lives, yet most new discoveries never reach the people who need them. The average new drug costs $2.6 billion to develop and the R&D, testing, and approval process can take up to 15 years. Despite this significant investment, the success rate remains low with the U.S. National Institutes of Health reporting that nine out of ten drugs entering clinical trials ultimately fail.

It is a problem Qasim Parekh learned firsthand while working in the pharmaceutical industry. His turning point came when he heard a Supreme Court judge speak about his own cancer journey. He was given only five years to live but survived by navigating through almost 20 clinical trials and spending over a million dollars to find a treatment that worked.

The judge said that his success wasn’t just about money. It was about having the right network, and that most people would never have the same access.

This struck Parekh, especially because cancer had also affected his own family. That inefficiency and lack of access became the core problem he wanted to solve.

“My aunt had recently passed away from cancer. The tool that we are working on actually would have saved her, had it been all completely market ready. So these things are very powerful,” he says.

Parekh and Zjardyn Liera-Hood, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo founded CellaraRx to address this gap by helping clinicians identify which patients are most likely to benefit from specific cancer therapies.

Using single-cell RNA sequencing data, CellaraRx’s technology can predict which patients will develop resistance to certain drugs to improve clinical trial design, increase drug approval rates, and ultimately make life-saving treatments more accessible to the people who need them.

Understanding why clinical trials fail

The challenge for developing cancer treatments is in the individual ways patients respond to medicine. Two people diagnosed with the same type of cancer will react differently to the same treatment plan.

“When a doctor looks at us, they see the same diagnosis and often the same treatment plan, because we share the same disease. They don’t necessarily know whether to give one patient the red pill or the blue pill,” he says.

Now add in the fact that cancer medicines are highly toxic, and it is easy to understand why developing new medicines is expensive, time consuming, and has a high failure rate.

“Many drugs that succeed in phase two trials where they’re shown to be both safe and effective. Then they end up failing in phase three because when you combine a heterogeneous tumour with a heterogeneous population, and then apply a single targeted therapy, you’re almost setting the drug up to fail,” Parekh says.

Why the right data makes the difference

CellaraRx’s goal is to help identify in advance which patients will respond to a medicine and which won’t. With the right patients in clinical trials, clinicians can make more informed choices and effective drugs can reach the right patients faster.

“What we call personalized medicine today isn’t truly personalized. It’s really more like precision medicine,” he says.

Today, a clinical trial will identify two patients with the same biomarker and treat them with the same medicine. Parekh says the problem is even with the same biomarket, patient A might have resistant clone cells that the medicine is ineffective against.

A new way to see how drugs work

The breakthrough behind CellaraRx’s approach comes from advances in single-cell RNA sequencing, a next-generation technology that allows researchers to study how individual cells respond to treatment at a molecular level.

“What most people are familiar with is DNA sequencing, which tells us what’s in your genetic code. RNA sequencing goes a step further. It shows how those genes are expressed in real time. Only at that level can you truly understand the cause and effect of a drug on tissue,” Parekh explains.

This shift from DNA to RNA analysis opens a new frontier for personalized care. By creating highly specific models that show how different patients’ cells react to a given therapy, CellaraRx can help predict whether a drug will work or fail before it reaches the final stages of testing.

Once a model is validated and shown to have clinical significance, Parekh says it can be paired with a drug as part of the FDA approval process, paving the way for safer, more effective treatments to reach patients faster.

Building a business behind the science

While the science behind CellaraRx is complex, Parekh says turning it into a viable company came with its own challenges. That’s what led him to the Accelerator Centre.

“The AC is important because this is a difficult problem. We needed help understanding how to tackle it, not just from a technical perspective but from a business one too. The mentorship, the education, the structure all helps us navigate this problem that’s worth solving,” he says.

Parekh first learned about the Accelerator Centre through one of his professors in the University of Waterloo’s Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program, who suggested he join the program to access mentorship and resources that would prepare him for investors.

“Working with the AC mentors has been about learning to ask the right questions. They help you get your bearings—how to build a financial model, what documents you need in place, how to prepare from a business law perspective. It’s about building the foundation, step by step, so that when you’re ready to scale, you have everything you need in order.”

What’s next for CellaraRx

CellaraRx is already building momentum through a new partnership with the University of Minnesota.

“We’ve established a partnership with the University of Minnesota. They validated that this is a real problem. Now we’re at the stage of finding pilot programs to test and further improve the technology,” Parekh says.

As the company looks to the future, Parekh’s vision for success goes far beyond commercial milestones.

“Success for me is that every person that dreams about developing a medication should be able to test it. It doesn’t matter whether it works or not, they should be able to get the financing to do it. They shouldn’t be restricted. Science shouldn’t have to chase finance. Finance should follow science,” he says.

Parekh points to the history of medical discovery—from natural sources like tree bark to the modern molecular age—as an example of how far science has come, yet how risky it remains.

“We want to make drug research less of a risky endeavor. If a drug fails, that's fine, because you have to fail to learn from it. Fighting disease is not a one man show. It takes a collective effort, a global collective effort, and we need to be able to facilitate that.”