San Francisco-based diagnostics company, Veracyte, announced that it has brought in $45 million from healthcare investment firm Visium Healthcare Partners. This comes after it launched its IPO a few years ago.
Visium is planning to spread out the funding, starting with $25 million up front, and $5 million of which will go toward paying off some of the company’s debt. After that, an additional $15 million will be available into the summer of 2017 as long as Veracyte meets some set milestones. The additional $5 million will come if the company decides to make an equity offering in the end of the time period.
So far Veracyte has made progress with its Afirma Thyroid FNA Analysis product and a cytopathology assesment and gene expression test which looks to determine if a thyroid nodule is cancerous.
The next step for the company is to focus on its Percepta Bronchial Genomic Classifier – this was picked up back in 2014 when it brought in $21 million in a deal with Allegro Diagnostics. This test allows doctors to look at 23 genes in cells lining the respiratory tract to better diagnose lung cancer.
Click here to see a video demonstrating the goal behind Percepta.
