Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment Decisions: The Role of Early Relapse Detection with First Ascent Biomedical

When five-year-old Logan Jenner’s acute myeloid leukemia (AML) returned after years of grueling treatment and a brief remission, his family faced the same question haunting thousands of others navigating the minefield of recurrent cancers: what now? For Logan, the answer arrived not through another round of conventional therapy, but through a data-driven approach that sidestepped trial-and-error in favor of something far more precise.

Logan had already endured three lines of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and nearly half a year of inpatient treatment before his cancer relapsed. The options, already thin, were dwindling. But a clinical trial at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami offered a novel approach—Functional Precision Medicine (FPM), a platform developed by First Ascent Biomedical that aims to match patients with treatments based on how their own live tumor cells respond to drugs in real time.

The science behind FPM moves beyond genomic testing alone. While genomics can uncover mutations and potential targets, they often stop short of predicting actual therapeutic response. FPM fills that gap by integrating live-cell drug sensitivity testing, genomic analysis, and artificial intelligence to pinpoint which therapies will be most effective for a specific patient’s cancer. Within about 10 days, oncologists receive a personalized report—evidence-based, actionable, and tailored.

For Logan, FPM revealed a drug combination that wouldn’t have been obvious through genomics alone. This personalized strategy became the new roadmap for his care. Today, Logan is cancer-free once again—and thriving.

His case underscores both the promise and the urgency of functional precision medicine, particularly for patients with relapsed or treatment-resistant cancers. Despite decades of research, cancer care is still often guided by consensus-based protocols rather than real-time data. While such protocols provide valuable frameworks, they can’t account for the complex, patient-specific nature of cancer biology—especially in aggressive forms like AML, which remains prone to relapse even after intensive intervention.

In 2025 alone, over two million Americans were diagnosed with cancer, and more than 600,000 died from it. For many of those patients, particularly those with advanced or refractory disease, the timeline for effective decision-making is perilously short. First Ascent Biomedical's approach aims to reclaim that time, using real tumor responses to rapidly direct treatment plans.

A study published in Nature Medicine supports the impact of this approach: 83% of patients in First Ascent’s clinical trials experienced improved outcomes with FPM-guided therapy, remaining cancer-free for a median of 8.5 times longer than during previous treatments. For oncologists, this kind of evidence-based insight is not just helpful—it’s transformative.

Key to FPM’s advantage is its ability to eliminate ineffective options early, minimizing unnecessary toxicity while accelerating the path to remission. Automation and robotics enable the platform to scale, ensuring that personalized testing isn’t just available to a privileged few. Artificial intelligence further sharpens its utility by prioritizing drugs before testing and interpreting data afterward—allowing clinicians to focus on clinical care rather than computational analysis.

The result is a system where patients are spared from the uncertainty of "watch-and-wait" strategies or sequential drug cycling. Instead, they benefit from a treatment pathway informed by how their own cancer behaves in a lab environment—a model that, while still in early stages of integration, could fundamentally reshape oncology practice.

Of course, hurdles remain. Reimbursement models, clinical workflows, and institutional adoption all present real-world barriers. But the momentum is building, particularly as patients and advocates—like Logan’s mother, now Head of Patient Advocacy at First Ascent—demand more personalized, evidence-based approaches. Her family’s experience has become a rallying point for reimagining how treatment decisions are made, especially when standard options have run their course.