Meet 2025 President’s Innovation Challenge Finalist: TerraFlow

Why It Matters

By automating biomarker extraction, TerraFlow could shave years off drug development, delivering therapies to patients faster and reducing R&D costs.

Key Takeaways

• Founder lost mother to cancer, driving mission urgency
• Teraflow uses patented AI to extract biomarkers from literature
• Platform aligns pharma data with known biology for experiment planning
• Paying customers include Cleveland Clinic and Memorial Sloan Kettering
• Paid pilots underway with top-tier pharmaceutical companies worldwide

Summary

TerraFlow, a finalist in the 2025 President’s Innovation Challenge, was introduced by founder Dan Freeman, a Harvard‑Med PhD student whose personal loss of his mother to cancer in December 2023 fuels the company’s urgency to speed life‑saving trials.

Freeman explains that current biomedical research relies on biologists manually reading papers and annotating cell types, a slow process that leaves valuable data untapped. TerraFlow’s patented AI scans the entire literature, extracts every reported biomarker, and maps a pharmaceutical company’s results against existing knowledge to suggest the next optimal experiment.

The startup already counts the Cleveland Clinic and Memorial Sloan Kettering among its paying users and has secured paid pilots with several top‑tier pharmaceutical firms, demonstrating early market traction and validation of its technology.

If adopted broadly, TerraFlow could compress drug‑development timelines, lower R&D expenditures, and accelerate the delivery of oncology therapies, making it a strategic asset for both academic institutions and pharma pipelines.

Original Description

Meet 2025 President’s Innovation Challenge Finalist: TerraFlow

TerraFlow, founded by Dan Freeman (PhD student, Harvard Medical School), is building AI-powered tools to accelerate lifesaving cancer research.

By analyzing biomarker data across the scientific literature, TerraFlow helps researchers understand how their results align with existing knowledge—and identify what experiment should come next.

TerraFlow is speeding the path to breakthroughs that can’t wait.