NEW YORK – Avitia on Thursday said it is launching with a C$5 million (US$3.3 million) seed investment to advance a molecular testing platform for cancer patients that will be located on-site at clinical centers rather than at a central laboratory.
PacBridge Capital Partners provided the funds, which Montreal-based Avitia intends to use to expand into new markets and improve its platform's capabilities. The technology the company is building on was originally developed by Imagia Canexia Health in collaboration with Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, and is currently in use in the US, Canada, and Southeast Asia. Imagia Canexia Health, a health technology firm formerly led by PacBridge partner James Lumsdaine, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Lumsdaine is now CEO of Avitia.
The Imagia Canexia Health Insights Platform, which garnered a CE-IVD mark in Europe in 2022, relied on Illumina's NextSeq and MiSeq devices to sequence blood or tumor samples and used machine learning to detect variants, interpret their clinical significance, and identify optimal treatments for patients, including therapies in clinical trials.
Avitia said its platform analyzes liquid biopsy samples and allows clinics to conduct molecular profiling on biopsies in their own laboratories, reducing cost and turnaround time.
In a retrospective study, researchers demonstrated that the platform could uncover endometrial and ovarian cancer recurrence several months before it was detectable by conventional biomarkers or clinical and radiologic criteria.
"Using minimally invasive liquid biopsy technology, we've proven that Avitia technology has the potential to improve patient monitoring as well as treatment response, especially for more aggressive endometrial and ovarian cancers," study author Jessica McAlpine, an oncologist at the University of British Columbia and British Columbia Cancer Agency, said in a statement.