A personally funded oncology fund

Engineering the end of cancer.

Capital for the companies and researchers working to make cancer survivable. Personally funded, decided in days — not months.

Who am I — @MaorShlomo ↗·LinkedIn ↗

The thesis

Cancer will be manageable within a generation. The question is when.

Second Light is built around a working thesis about what could pull that date closer — for the science, and for the people waiting on it.

Working thesis

Where I think progress may come from.

These are the areas I believe are worth exploring. They are hypotheses, not answers.

Programmable medicine

I believe programmable platforms will dominate medicine. Today, drug development is largely ‘analog’: build an inhibitor with a fixed design. Platforms like mRNA point toward medicines that can be reprogrammed and potentially personalized.

Functional testing infrastructure

Organoids, tumoroids, and lab automation that turn functional testing into standardized data — letting drug developers iterate faster and, eventually, compress clinical timelines.

Bio cloud services

A programmable layer between AI hypothesis and wet-lab execution: synthesise, test, measure, return data. The feedback loop that lets discovery run autonomously.

Durable immune memory

In solid tumors, the modalities worth backing trigger a lasting immune response, not just tumour shrinkage. ADCs and chemo buy time; this ends the disease.

Continuous disease measurement

PET-CT is a snapshot. MRD blood tests are a step forward. The goal is ongoing, high-resolution monitoring that lets clinicians change therapy faster.

Unpatentable therapies

Repurposed drugs and interventions like exercise may have real impact on outcomes. No financial model funds Phase 3 trials for them. That gap is worth closing.

Pay for outcomes

Cancer care should be paid for risk-adjusted, quality-adjusted survival — not the volume of treatments delivered. Too often, financial incentives reward doing more rather than helping people live longer and better. I believe fixing that misalignment is part of the cure.

How it works

Two ways to fund progress.

We back companies and fund research directly. If the work can improve how cancer is detected, treated, or monitored, we want to understand it.

Companies

We invest in early-stage teams building practical tools, platforms, and treatments for cancer.

Research

We provide grants to researchers testing promising ideas before they are ready to become companies.

Selected work

Who I am

I’m Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44, and previously co-founder and CEO of Explorium.

I lost my mother to cancer; Second Light is my commitment to do everything I can so fewer families have to go through the same.

Get in touch

Working on something that can change outcomes?

Founders and researchers alike. Write to maor@second-light.org or leave a short note below.