FOUR PEOPLE STAND, eyes squinting, on the verdant, freshly mowed field of Boston’s Fenway Park. It’s a blue-sky summer day, a perfect afternoon for a baseball game. The smiles on their faces are broad, if a bit shy. They are among the lucky ones—the tiny share of people who fought and survived pancreatic cancer.

The scene is from a photograph pinned to a cubicle at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “What is it about these four people on the field?” asks James Moser, executive director of the Institute for Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery at Beth Israel. “Each one of them is sort of their own miracle.”

Berg, a biotech startup in nearby Framingham, Massachusetts, is working with Moser and other researchers to find out why.

Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease. It is now the third-most-common cause of cancer death in the U.S., surpassing breast cancer for the first time last year. More than 53,000 people will receive a pancreatic cancer diagnosis this year, and about 73% of those people will die within a year of that diagnosis.

Founded in 2006, Berg is using a mix of data analytics software and in-the-lab drug development to find new treatments for devastating diseases like cancer, diabetes, and central nervous system disorders. The company, named after co-founder and chairman Carl Berg, the billionaire Silicon Valley real estate developer and investor, has the audacious goal of transforming how the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries approach drug development.