NEW YORK – C2i Genomics said on Tuesday that it has raised $12 million in a Series A financing round, led by Casdin Capital and joined by additional new investors including NFX Capital, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, and others.
The New York-based startup will use the funding to develop and clinically validate its personalized, real-time tool for monitoring recurrence and treatment response for various types of solid cancers.
C2i said its liquid biopsy platform detects and quantifies small amounts of residual disease in patients' blood by using a personalized tumor "fingerprint," which represents thousands of mutations for each patient.
The firm believes that the genome-wide signature detection method, in combination with its proprietary mathematical inference models and machine learning techniques, provides ultra-sensitive quantification of the amount of circulating tumor DNA in a patient's blood and accurately captures the cancer's response.
"This Series A funding will allow us to take the next major step in our growth and advance our core technology into pilot and pivotal validation studies in several oncology indications," Asaf Zviran, CEO and cofounder of C2i Genomics, said in a statement. "We believe that the improvement in sensitivity we've achieved will allow physicians to quantitatively monitor their patient treatment response and detect treatment failure or disease recurrence months and even years before they would do otherwise."
In January, C2i partnered with Irvine, California-based Genomic Testing Cooperative to develop liquid biopsy assays for solid tumor staging and monitoring.