Meet Polly: The Medneon Mascot

How This Little Pup Represents Medneon’s Big Mission

Brand characters come in all forms and personalities, and act as an important reminder of a company’s mission, focus, and values. When we set out to pick our mascot, the decision to adopt (not shop) a canine came easy. Dogs have long been recognized as a powerful symbol of guidance and companionship.

Along with their extraordinary therapeutic abilities, such as reducing anxiety and easing loneliness, dogs are capable of using their senses in ways humans (but maybe computers) will never be able to, such as recognizing biochemical changes in the body and sniffing out cancer.

Basically, dogs are awesome, and our unfading passion for the work we do gets us one step closer to our shared goal: Be as awesome as dogs.

At Medneon, our mission is to empower individuals and their care team to get ahead of life-threatening disease, with the ultimate goal to prevent cancer by identifying high-risk individuals and optimizing management. And, just as paramount, we aim to empower patients with knowledge, advocate for them, and provide emotional support, all through connecting at-risk and newly diagnosed individuals with leading nationwide experts in cancer management and cancer genetics.

Let’s review a few things Polly and Medneon have in common.

We Assess Risk

Dogs have unique abilities that help them to detect cancer through smell, sense the onset of a seizure, and anticipate diabetic hypoglycemia.

Our Predictive Risk Assessment (PRA) tool was designed to determine who is at elevated risk to develop cancer by evaluating personal and family history information. We know that understanding your risk can help tailor management recommendations and potentially prevent a serious life-threatening event. We believe in risk assessment for all!

We Save Lives

A trained seizure dog can help break someone’s fall or position themselves to help prevent injury. Those who hold the tools to prevent disease or injury have a duty to wield them. We believe the right tools in the hands of the right people have the power to save lives.

Our Personalized Genetic Insights (PGI) tool provides clinical decision support based on the most up-to-date AI and human knowledgebases. When an individual is identified to be at high risk, our tool provides point-of-care, personalized decision support on managing those risks. With appropriate management, many types of cancer can be detected early when they are most treatable, or even prevented.

We Provide Service & Support

Dogs top the list of support animals. Apologies to the support cats, micropigs, and goats out there. Dogs are well known to serve those with disabilities, offer comfort to persons healing from a mental or physical disorder, and simply, but profoundly, offer companionship.

At Medneon, we help patients understand and navigate their cancer risk and dependably guide them through the cancer journey. We recognized the voids and gaps that interfered with patients receiving the best possible care, and we developed an end-to-end technology platform to connect these silos.

We Fetch... Data

Dogs have an ingrained disposition to chase and bring back items, as their ancestors would hunt, chase, and retrieve prey.

At Medneon, we leverage both human expertise and artificial intelligence to provide the most up-to-date knowledge to our user network. And we never stop fetching. Medical literature continues to grow exponentially, making it increasingly difficult for healthcare professionals to locate and extract clinically useful information. Our partnership with ASK2ME, a Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute developed artificial intelligence database, works to solve this issue through natural language processing and machine learning. Importantly, collecting more data demands thinking more deeply about how to use it. This is where the humans step in.

We’re a Mixed-Breed

Just like Polly, we are not breed-specific. We are a team of doctors, genetic counselors, data scientists, engineers, and researchers from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. We are both male and female strong, and diverse in our ethnicity, culture, and beliefs. We even employ people who like cats.