NEW YORK – Foresight Diagnostics, a startup founded by Stanford University scientists, said Wednesday that it has closed a $12.5 million Series A financing led by Civilization Ventures and Bluebird Ventures, with participation by Pear Ventures.
The funding will support the company's efforts to commercialize a tissue-agnostic minimal residual disease detection technology called PhasED-Seq, which stands for Phased Variant Enrichment & Detection Sequencing.
Foresight plans to launch its first CLIA-validated assay to support MRD-driven clinical trials in B-cell lymphomas. This would be a first step toward broader application across other tumor types.
According to the company, PhasED-Seq can be used "off the shelf" without a need for tissue analysis or the creation of customized assays due to dramatically improved sensitivity, up to an order of magnitude higher than competing commercial tools.
Foresight said that data being reported this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting has shown that PhasED-Seq can detect ctDNA at levels as low as one part per million.
This "unprecedented sensitivity … addresses a critical unmet need for how we clinically manage oncology patients," company cofounder and Stanford researcher Max Diehn said in a statement. "We now have a way to more accurately identify those patients who are not cured with standard treatments, and to direct aggressive and novel therapies accordingly."
With multiple studies already underway, the firm said it believes PhasED-Seq could become the future standard of care for ctDNA-guided clinical trials.