Alum's company uses machine learning & chemistry to detect cancer in early stages

If Gabe Otte '11 hadn't had a Cornell advisor who steered him down a more challenging path and hadn't had some chance conversations with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, he might be squirreled away in a lab somewhere. Instead, he's the CEO of Freenome, a start-up just awarded 5.5 million in venture capital for its product, a data-driven blood test that can detect various types of cancers in their earliest stages and recommend the best treatments. Otte came to Cornell planning to study computer science, but a freshman-year advisor encouraged him to choose another major. "I had been coding and programming since I was nine years old," Otte said, so he elected to study chemistry and computational biology, using his knack for computer science to do his homework. "I fell in love with chemistry when I took organic chemistry," he said, adding that he developed his own computer program to do computations related to the synthesis of molecules.