NEW YORK – Precision oncology firm Predicta Biosciences announced Tuesday that it has raised $5.2 million in an oversubscribed seed financing round.
The round was led by The Engine Ventures, with additional funding from Illumina Ventures, Time Boost Capital, the American Cancer Society Bright Edge, and the Oetgen family. Jay Wohlgemuth, former CMO of Quest Diagnostics, Mara Aspinall, partner at Illumina VC and former CEO of Roche Tissue Diagnostics, and Ann DeWitt, general partner at The Engine Ventures, will join the company's board.
Predicta Bio plans to use the funding to expand its team and build a CLIA laboratory and workflow for sequencing and bioinformatics, it said in a statement. The company was founded last year at Blavatnik Harvard Life Lab Longwood by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and clinicians from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute.
Predicta is developing a diagnostic and monitoring platform that provides targeted information for diagnosis, treatment decision-making, and patient monitoring using blood draws instead of bone marrow biopsies for blood cancers. Its diagnostic tests will initially focus on multiple myeloma and its first test, GenoPredicta, is being used for research at Dana-Farber with plans to launch commercially next year. The firm said it eventually plans to expand its platform into lymphoma and autoimmune disorders.
The Boston-based company is also collecting genomic and transcriptomic data from before and after treatment and using artificial intelligence to mine the data for novel target discovery and therapeutics development, it said.
"Our mission is twofold: to deliver noninvasive tests that diagnose cancer in the earliest stages and develop a one-of-a-kind clinical database that identifies new drug targets and immune signatures," Predicta CEO Kate Caves said in a statement. "Predicta is using blood-based multiomics to more easily diagnose patients sooner and enable personalized monitoring and treatment throughout their care journey."
"In addition to providing more complete information on a patient's multiple myeloma, our tests evaluate patients' immune system cells, equipping physicians with the unique and critical ability to determine the likelihood of a patient responding to new immunotherapies like CAR T-cell therapy and bispecific antibodies," Kenneth Anderson, Predicta's clinical cofounder, added in a statement.