Every year, millions of individuals receive a life-altering cancer diagnosis. For decades, the standard medical approach has treated this incredibly complex, shape-shifting disease with generic protocols. Doctors routinely rely on a mix of standard-of-care options like chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, applied based on statistical averages across massive populations. Yet, every single tumor is a highly distinct, evolving biological structure. What cures one patient might fail completely in another.
Historically, precision medicine has looked to genomics, analyzing DNA sequences, to find targeted solutions. While genomics has unlocked critical insights, it captures only a single dimension of a tumor’s reality. A genetic map cannot fully reveal how a physical tumor interacts with surrounding tissue, how blood vessels feed it, or exactly how a surgeon should navigate its precise margins in an operating room. Oncology has long suffered from a structural visibility gap: clinicians are forced to make high-stakes, irreversible treatment decisions based on flat, two-dimensional scans and static microscopic biopsies.
The consequences of this gap are profoundly felt by families worldwide. Treating cancer without complete, individualized foresight can lead to over-treatment, where patients suffer debilitating side effects from therapies that provide little benefit. Conversely, under-treatment can allow aggressive cells to slip through undetected. The medical community has desperately needed a bridge between advanced computational power and the raw, spatial physics of human anatomy.
The Search for Complete Visibility
SimBioSys, a pioneering TechBio company officially incorporated in 2018, emerged directly from this critical need. Operating at the cutting edge of digital medicine, the company fuses artificial intelligence, data science, and spatial biophysics to create what the industry calls a “digital twin” of an individual tumor. Instead of looking at cancer through isolated variables, SimBioSys virtualizes the entire disease in four dimensions.
By taking standard, non-invasive clinical imaging data, such as routine MRIs or CT scans, the company’s proprietary technology platforms automatically segment and reconstruct a tumor’s precise physical, chemical, and biological environment. This allows clinicians to model exactly how a tumor behaves, how it reacts to specific drug doses, and how it relates to adjacent anatomical structures. It effectively transforms generic, flat images into fully dynamic, predictive treatment maps, ensuring that the right patient receives the exact right therapy at the ideal moment.
A Leader Forged in Innovation
To guide this transformative technology from a groundbreaking scientific concept into a ubiquitous clinical standard, SimBioSys appointed Stacey Stevens as its President and Chief Executive Officer in January 2025. Stevens is a deeply seasoned medical technology executive with over two decades of highly specialized commercial, strategic, and operational leadership.
Before stepping into the helm at SimBioSys, Stevens served as the President and CEO of iCAD, a global pioneer in artificial intelligence-driven cancer detection and therapy solutions. Her tenure at iCAD was defined by market-defining milestones, most notably orchestrating the commercial launch of the world’s first artificial intelligence software designed for 3D mammography (Tomosynthesis).
Her deep expertise spans the practical, real-world application of AI algorithms for comprehensive breast cancer risk assessment, early-stage detection, and sophisticated radiation therapy workflow optimization. Long before her executive ascension, Stevens cultivated a robust foundational skill set in sales, business development, and corporate marketing strategy across a series of healthcare giants, including Philips Healthcare, Agilent Technologies, and Hewlett-Packard’s Healthcare Solutions Group.
Educationally, Stevens holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of New Hampshire and an MBA from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Her sustained excellence in healthcare leadership has established her as one of the medical technology sector’s most respected visionaries.
A Deeply Personal Crusade
For Stevens, the relentless pursuit of better oncology solutions is not merely a professional trajectory or a corporate milestone; it is a deeply personal, generational mission. She is the daughter of a three-time breast cancer survivor and the mother of three daughters. This intimate, familial connection to the realities of cancer diagnosis and survival infuses her corporate leadership with an authentic, urgent advocacy that shapes every strategic choice she makes.
Stevens understands firsthand the paralyzing anxiety, the overwhelming flood of complex medical data, and the profound uncertainty that envelopes a family when a loved one is diagnosed. Her personal mission has always centered on early detection, radical transparency, and patient empowerment. This intrinsic motivation is reflected in her active role as a key executive advisor to Learn, Look, Locate, a prominent breast cancer education and advocacy community. Her work perfectly mirrors the core ethos of SimBioSys: taking the guesswork out of cancer care to preserve not just lives, but the quality of those lives.
From a Small Dinette to Global Classrooms
The origin story of SimBioSys matches the classic, humble trajectory of a transformative technology startup. In late 2017, sitting around a modest dinette table in Champaign, Illinois, two academic researchers, Dr. Joe Peterson and Dr. John Cole, pored over a newly funded National Cancer Institute grant. Working together in a university laboratory at the University of Illinois, they had been experimenting with novel approaches to mathematical cancer modeling. They recognized a massive, unaddressed vacancy in how oncological decisions were structured, and wondered if they could build a purely software-based solution to simulate tumor biology.
The company was formally incorporated in 2018. Shortly thereafter, Tushar Pandey joined the mission as the initial Chief Executive Officer to structure the business and guide its foundational venture scale. The company set out to build its flagship simulation engine, TumorScope. Unlike alternative precision medicine platforms that require costly, tissue-destructive genetic sequencing, SimBioSys designed its software to utilize readily available, previously acquired datasets that every hospital already collects.
By applying mechanistic physics models directly to standard patient scans, they succeeded in virtualizing cancer. The company quickly gained commercial traction, securing a $15 million Series A funding round co-led by premier life science investors Genoa Ventures and Northpond Ventures, eventually expanding total capital funding to over $20 million.
Overcoming Skepticism and Earning Trust
Building a company at the intersection of hard physics, artificial intelligence, and clinical oncology is an exercise in overcoming deep-rooted institutional skepticism. The medical establishment is inherently conservative, demanding exhaustive, peer-reviewed empirical evidence before changing clinical workflows. SimBioSys had to prove that its virtual, software-generated tumors could flawlessly mirror the messy, unpredictable reality of human biology.
The company met this challenge through rigorous validation studies. SimBioSys has published more than ten peer-reviewed papers and presented dozens of abstracts at premier medical conferences like the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). In a milestone retrospective study encompassing 800 patients, the platform demonstrated volumetric measurement errors of under 4%. Furthermore, a pivotal study conducted alongside the University of Chicago revealed that the company’s technology achieved a 91% sensitivity and 93% specificity rate in predicting how a patient would completely respond to a physician’s choice of therapy right at the initial time of diagnosis.
This extensive scientific validation paved the way for monumental regulatory achievements. The company secured U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its TumorSight™ Viz platform. This cloud-based software transforms flat, hard-to-interpret 2D breast MRIs into fully interactive, visually stunning 3D digital twins, allowing surgeons to execute highly precise preoperative planning.
The Intersection of Three Disciplines
The underlying competitive advantage of SimBioSys rests upon its unique, tri-disciplinary scientific approach:
- Artificial Intelligence: The software utilizes automated machine learning algorithms to instantly ingest raw imaging data, isolating and segmenting the exact margins of the tumor from surrounding healthy tissue walls.
- Spatial Biophysics: Instead of treating a tumor like a uniform blob, the system models the localized physics, fluid dynamics, and cellular biochemistry of the mass, mapping exactly how nutrients, oxygen, and drugs flow through the distinct spatial regions of the tumor.
- Data Science: By cross-referencing individual simulations against massive, aggregated patient outcomes data, the platform continuously refines its algorithms to estimate long-term prognosis and response behavior.
Through this comprehensive framework, SimBioSys offers distinct products tailored for both clinical environments and the pharmaceutical industry. For clinicians, the TumorSight portfolio provides surgical planning tools, while clinical validation stages are actively advancing toward formal FDA submission for its sister product, TumorSight Risk, which is designed to calculate the statistical risk of breast cancer recurrence using image-based AI. For pharmaceutical researchers, the PhenoScope™ platform delivers a four-dimensional analytical playground, allowing drug developers to discover novel biomarkers and simulate exactly how experimental therapies will perform across virtual patient cohorts before entering costly human clinical trials.
Empowering the Front Lines
Stacey Stevens’ leadership style is fundamentally rooted in collaborative commercialization, scientific integrity, and deep empathy for the end user. She operates not as a detached tech executive, but as a deeply aligned partner to the medical community. To steer the company’s global commercialization chapter, she works alongside Chief Commercial Officer Jyoti Palaniappan, heavily prioritizing deep, non-transactional research and commercial collaborations with the world’s most prestigious medical institutions, including the Mayo Clinic, UCLA, and UT Southwestern.
Stevens champions an organizational culture where cross-functional collaboration is mandatory. At SimBioSys, computational biologists, AI engineers, and clinical oncologists do not work in isolated silos; they build together. Stevens ensures that every technical advancement directly maps to a practical, time-sensitive question that a doctor faces at a patient’s bedside. Her leadership emphasizes transparency, rigorous adherence to compliance, and a shared passion for democratizing access to high-tier precision medicine.
A Vision for Democratic, Global Precision Care
Looking ahead, the future of SimBioSys under Stacey Stevens is defined by rapid scale, therapeutic expansion, and systemic clinical integration. While the company’s initial commercial successes and FDA clearances have profoundly changed early-stage breast cancer treatment, active validation is already moving swiftly into other major solid tumors, including lung and prostate cancers.
The company’s ultimate trajectory is to establish its digital twin technology as an ubiquitous, baseline standard of care globally. By utilizing standard, existing imaging infrastructure rather than requiring specialized laboratory equipment, SimBioSys is uniquely positioned to bring world-class precision medicine to community hospitals and rural clinics, not just elite academic medical hubs.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape global healthcare, the combination of SimBioSys’ spatial biophysics models and Stacey Stevens’ commercial execution points toward a future where every single cancer patient receives a personalized, optimized, and visual treatment map, effectively removing the devastating element of trial-and-error from the global fight against cancer.
