With a simple blood test, Epic Sciences can help physicians monitor the condition and severity of a cancer patient’s cancer by analyzing the intricacies of his or her circulating tumor cells.
The San Diego company just raised $30 million in a Series C round to commercialize what CEO Murali Prahalad calls its “no cell left behind” diagnostic test – it offers real-time information about genomic and proteomic changes, helping personalize patient therapy and drug resistance monitoring. It plans to automate its technology with the new funding, and advance multiple clinical studies to file for 510(k) approval.
Nearly 40 clinical trials using Epic’s test are underway, Prahalad said. The company is growing fast, with more than 30 partnerships with pharma companies in play; last year, it had just six.
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“Here we have a very adaptive, evolving disease – but right now, we only take a single snapshot with a biopsy,” Prahalad said. “What we really need is a movie.” Epic Sciences provides just that, he said – a noninvasive movie that helps docs really understand how a therapy is working.
It’s been long known that many cancers spread by shedding circulating tumor cells into the bloodstream. Like an invasive species, the mutated cells use the circulatory system to travel to other parts of the body, where they become the basis of new tumors. But while in the past researchers understood the mechanism in which cancer’s spread, the disease’s highly variable, ever-changing nature made it difficult to develop a catch-all test that could pinpoint individual mutated cells as cancerous or not.
“Just as cancer is a very heterogeneous disease, so too are circulating cancer cells,” Prahalad said. “There’s incredible variability on the cell surface.”
Epic Sciences, founded in 2008 from research from San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute, has built a fine-tooth comb that analyzes every cell’s shape and sustaining pattern with novel software tools to “find the outliers that are cancer cells,” Prahald said. Every test looks at about 6 million cells, with 90 different parameters, which “flag these outliers quite robustly,” he said.
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Notably, the company has also added Greg Lucier to its board. Lucier is the former CEO of Life Technologies, the San Diego gene sequencing company that was acquired last year for $13.6 billion.
The preferred stock financing round included new investors RusnanoMedInvest and Arcus Ventures, on top of existing investors Domain Associates, Roche Venture Fund, Pfizer Venture Investments and a number of undisclosed individual investors.