A company developing next-generation sequencing for health care systems has raised a venture capital funding round led by two of the world’s largest drug companies.
Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Strata Oncology said last week that it had raised $26 million in a Series B round led by Pfizer Ventures and Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, joined by Deerfield Management and Renaissance Venture Capital Fund. Existing investors Arboretum Ventures and Baird Capital – which led a $12 million Series A funding round the company closed in June 2016 – also took part.
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The company said it plans to use the funding to expand expand the pool of health systems using its platform; further develop its clinical-genomic data and software platforms; file with the Food and Drug Administration for approval of its StrataNGS profiling assay; and launch a study to support indication-expansion studies for drugs currently on the market.
The company anticipates filing for FDA approval of StrataNGS in early 2019 and, assuming everything goes smoothly, receiving approval later that year, CEO Dan Rhodes said in an interview. The product currently covers about 90 cancer genes and is able to pick up all the known mutations and other types of genetic alterations across them, he added.
While Foundation Medicine has been “blazing the trail” in terms of regulatory approval and reimbursement for NGS, Rhodes said Strata has taken a different approach. Whereas Foundation Medicine typically markets to individual physicians who may consider using its system for individual patients, Strata works with health systems to develop standardized platforms to test all their patients in order to improve their ability to offer precision medicine clinical trials. Whereas large cancer centers like New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering have that capability, most health systems do not, he said, and Strata’s goal is to help them build it internally. Ultimately, the idea is to improve their ability to rapidly enroll patients in the trials.
Currently, Strata is working with health systems like Kaiser Permanente in northern California, Ochsner Health System in Louisiana and Christiana Care Health System in Delaware, along with academic cancer centers at the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina and the University of Wisconsin, Rhodes said. It also has partnerships with drug makers like Clovis Oncology, for a prostate cancer study of the drug Rubraca, and with Epizyme, to support development of the drug tazemetostat.
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Additionally, it has partnerships with oncology-focused contract research organizations, but Rhodes declined to disclose their names. However, he said that Strata’s long-term vision is to work with one or two CROs given that it would help with scale and efficiency when working with a large number of drug companies, as opposed to each drug maker having its own choice of CRO.
In addition to Foundation Medicine, other companies working in NGS include Illumina, Agilent Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific and others. A report by MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the global market for NGS will reach $12.45 billion by 2022.
Photo: Natali_Mis, Getty Images
