A startup developing precision health technology for cancer has raised its first major round of venture capital funding.
Chicago-based CancerIQ said Thursday that it had closed a Series A funding round of $4.8 billion, led by HealthX Ventures, which is a digital health-focused venture capital firm. The company said it plans to use the money to further growth of its product offering and integration with electronic health records and genetic testing partners.
CancerIQ’s technology is focused on allowing hospitals to use genomics to personalize the prevention and early detection of cancers. Designed to integrate easily into the clinical workflow, the platform helps providers identify, evaluate and manage populations based on genetic risk factors while also enabling virtual visits.
“Our mission is really to predict and preempt hereditary diseases, starting off with those that are most prevalent in our community,” said CancerIQ CEO Feyi Ayodele in a phone interview. Diseases that are of particular interest include hereditary breast, ovarian and colon cancer, as well as familial hypercholesterolemia, she added.
The company said its workflows allow health systems to use precision health strategies for patients predisposed to cancer by identifying the 25% of those who qualify for genetic testing; streamlining the genetic testing and counseling process, over telehealth if required; managing high-risk patients over time; and tracking outcomes at the individual and population levels.
Partnering is of interest as well, in diagnostics as well as life sciences.
“If you think about it, there are a number of innovations out there – billions raised for genetic testing companies and liquid biopsy companies and companies that are producing targeted therapies,” Ayodele said. “The challenges they all face are provider knowledge that patients are appropriate for that therapy and ease of use for providers to actually take advantage of those innovations that are out there.”
The news closely follows the release on Aug. 6 of a report by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Connected Medicine, showing that most hospital and health systems foresee an increase in genomics and genetics vendors in 2023, with nine-in-10 saying they were already providing genomic or genetic testing or were planning to do so.
Photo: claudenakagawa, Getty Images
