From Inspiration to Impact: Building Oncosia Scientific

The journey from an idea to a functioning healthcare startup is rarely straightforward. It’s a path filled with personal motivations, professional challenges, and countless lessons.

For the founders of Oncosia Scientific, this journey began with a deeply personal experience—one that shaped their mission to improve cancer prevention through digital solutions.

In this piece, we speak to one co-founder Nico Schürrle, and explore the story behind Oncosia, the obstacles they faced in creating their flagship product, OncoPrevia, and how their diverse team came together to make an impact in the world of personalised cancer care.

What inspired you to start Oncosia Scientific, and what was the journey like from idea to execution?

One of my close family member was affected by prostate cancer.

My back-then fiancé and nowadays wife Seval was working as a researcher in the University Hospital in Würzburg, Germany at that time and she was actually researching about a very specific treatment line for metastasized prostate cancer. She was a great help to the whole journey and she was also the one, who made me touch healthcare from a professional perspective.

She always loved the idea of helping cancer patients with an own clinic in her homecountry of Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. During the corona pandemic we spent a lot of time together in a small apartment and worked on the idea, where then the initial form of nowadays Oncosia was born.

We wanted to develop a health program to prevent people from experience what we experienced with my family member, that’s when the idea for OncoPrevia, a personalized digital approach to cancer early detection, was born. I quit my full-time cooperate job in March 2023 and started to work on our venture.

What challenges did you face in building a digital solution like OncoPrevia, and how did you overcome them?

So to speak, healthcare itself is a big challenge and is very specific to each country.

We are based in Germany, so we fall under the EU Medical Device Regulation with our product, which at the beginning was a big challenge to overcome.

I wouldn’t also say that we are already in safe waters, but we took big steps and laid out the base for a successful future since we released our fully conform medical software in November 2024. Beside complying with all the regulations, market access is difficult, but with the right supporters it is feasible.

But many common “startup laws” do not apply to healthcare innovation, which might seem as a slow progress at first but from my experience, it is a better approach to have a strong foundation of the product from which you can develop in future.

How did your background or previous experiences prepare you for creating a healthcare-focused startup?

I am a mechanical engineer by profession and studied some leadership masters. My whole professional career up until I founded our company was in the automotive sector, so to speak far away from what I am doing right now.

I was able to gain lots of experience as I was working in a medium-sized cooperation, where I got responsibilities fast and developed an own small department around digitalization, this was also where my love for software sparked. Software has such a fast pace in its own development, which I loved.

My leadership experience, working in an environment where projects are generally not on the planned timeline and having dedicated customer specifications prepared me quite well for what I am doing right now.

Especially being able to understand norms and specification helped me a lot for building a proper quality management system and software development process for digital healthcare applications in Oncosia.

But of course, I had to gain a lot of domain knowledge in medicine, specifically cancer and prevention, which definitely is always an ongoing process. But for that, I also have my medical team which is great.

What was the most pivotal moment in your entrepreneurial journey so far?

During my work as a team leader in cooperate with a fixed budget, I never felt the pressure of doing something wrong with it, as I was confident that I can make good decisions for the company. The big difference was that we had a running business model. Now we are at the beginning with Oncosia, so the financial pressure is real, as we are currently bootstrapped.

Even if this might not really feel as a pivotal moment, it is one of the most challenging aspects of this journey.

How did you approach building a team for Oncosia Scientific, and what qualities do you look for in collaborators?

In this topic I can call myself very lucky.

I had from the beginning already with my wife Seval and with my brother two people on my hand, who contributed a lot. Seval has a huge medical network, where we easily got all the necessary contacts and my brother has long years’ experience in software security and architecture, which gave me the security to build something, which is safe to use for our users. We extended our team with our medical doctor Berfin and are also growing right now, as we want to scale up our services.

Our team is very international, where there is one thing which units us all: We want to work on something, which can have a real impact. Even after working almost two years on this venture, you can feel the drive and motivation in each team meeting and by the work which is done.

What makes OncoPrevia different from other cancer screening solutions on the market?

OncoPrevia has some important aspects: it is designed for use by patients and clinicians aside.

Most solutions on the market are one-sided, but therefore loose critical aspects of the benefits provided. Also, when we developed OncoPrevia, we wanted to make a holistic solution for cancer early detection (we cover the most prevalent cancer types), because as a patient you don’t want to be confronted with this topic several times a year.

It should be handled simple, fast and accurate. Beside the medical benefits with an accurate risk assessment and getting clear and concise information about which screenings should be done and when, it also helps users with administrative tasks.

From a medical perspective, the most important aspect is that it delivers personalized results, which enables to move from a population-based screening approach to a risk-adapted, personalized screening approach.

All in all, OncoPrevia provides many use cases which differentiates it definitely from its competitors: from private use, to use in a doctor’s office up to a full customized personalized screening program in a clinic or as an integration as a compliant 3^rd-party service into clinic software.

How do you envision OncoPrevia evolving over the next 5 years? Are there new features or services you’re excited to introduce?

Our vision for OncoPrevia is that it will be used as an enabler to move national screening programs away from population-based approach to a personalized approach.

This will take time as there is still ongoing research done, but in my opinion the lack of a digital solution to manage the personalization within screening programs was a big barrier for innovation and progress. Now with OncoPrevia, it is possible to handle a large-scale population in a personalized manner – but in the same sentence I have to mention, that clinical research on how to deliver it in the most meaningful way is still ongoing.

I am quite excited about what we are launching right now in Germany: We combine the results from OncoPrevia for private users with testkits for cancer early detection for home usage.

You can think about it like this: private persons can buy for example a PSA-value test for home usage. Our program covers a range of tests for home usages and based on the personalized screening plan, you will receive an individualized test package once per year or each 6 months, fully based on what is recommended by OncoPrevia, which is based on scientific guidelines.

Combined with a medical contact point for assistance we can deliver excellent cancer screening solutions for home usage, a convenient way to safe time and make personalized medicine accessible for private persons.

What role do you see technology playing in advancing personalized care, especially in cancer prevention?

Good question: in regards of cancer prevention our solution uses a mostly statistical approach on assessing the risk.

Science shows more and more how genetics and other markers affect the prognostics of certain disease. Therefore, I believe, technology is crucial to deliver personalized care, but I see it as a several step system. It is not feasible and ethical to genetically analyze a whole population, therefore we need a stepped system with a low-border risk identification to identify those, who benefit from further measures.

One important point I always like to mention, and that might sound strange now, is that I don’t see medical software as a stand-alone solution for healthcare challenges. Software needs to be integrated into the healthcare infrastructure to deliver maximal benefits to patients and clinicians, and this is the biggest challenge. So, technology is crucial, but integration might be even more important.

How has the feedback from patients and doctors shaped the development of OncoPrevia?

The feedback is why OncoPrevia looks like it is today. Our philosophy was always to create a strong foundation for our software, where we can develop fast as soon as we are on the market, but with full compliance to regulations like MDR and GDPR. Because we say from the beginning, let the patients and doctors speak how they need it, we give them a first throw of what we imagined delivering value. Feedback is something we collect on a daily bases, in direct phone calls with our patients or with dedicated meetings where we ask for feedback on what we are building from healthcare professionals.

What advice would you give to other founders trying to break into the health-tech space, particularly in personalised medicine?

Speak to someone, who did it before. I was quite naïve about entering into the health-tech space and was confronted with the reality quite quickly. I could have used some experienced entrepreneur from healthcare, who could have told me about the specific regulations, the challenges of market access and help with some network. On the other hand, maybe all of these insights would have stopped me from realizing our venture?

Visit the Oncosia Scientific website to find out more.