Lucence Diagnostics, a genomic drugs startup that develops non-invasive checks for most cancers screening, introduced at the moment that it has raised a $20 million Sequence A led by IHH Healthcare, one of many world’s largest built-in personal healthcare teams. Different contributors included SGInnovate and returning traders Heliconia Capital (a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings), Lim Kaling and Koh Boon Hwee.
The spherical might be used for scaling Lucence’s labs, hiring and making its merchandise commercially obtainable to extra sufferers in Asia and North America.
The funding can even help two potential medical trials. One will concentrate on its expertise’s sensitivity to actionable variables in late-stage most cancers sufferers, whereas the opposite will consider its use for early-stage detection in a number of forms of most cancers, together with lung, colorectal, breast and pancreatic. Lucence is at the moment designing a research that may contain 100,000 contributors to validate its early-stage detection take a look at. It’s going to recruit its first affected person in the course of subsequent yr and launch in the USA and Asia.
Along with its seed funding, this spherical brings Lucence’s whole raised to date to $29.2 million.
Lucence’s checks are at the moment utilized by physicians in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, and it plans to increase additional in North America and East Asia. Its lab in Singapore has obtained each CLIA certification and CAP accreditation, which implies its checks can be utilized by docs and sufferers in the USA. It’s also at the moment constructing a lab within the Bay Space to lower turnaround instances for sufferers.
Headquartered in Singapore, with places of work in San Francisco, Hong Kong and Suzhou, China, Lucence was based by CEO Dr. Min-Han Tan, an oncologist, and spun out from Singapore’s Company of Science, Know-how and Analysis (A*STAR) in 2016. Two years later, it launched LiquidHALLMARK, which the corporate describes as “the primary and solely medical sequencing blood take a look at that detects each cancer-related genetic mutations and cancer-causing viruses with a single assay” and appears for indicators of fourteen forms of most cancers. The corporate says LiquidHALLMARK has been utilized by oncologists for 1,000 sufferers in Asia to date.
Different genomic sequencing startups which have developed checks that display screen for most cancers dangers and indicators embrace Sanomics, Prenetics, Guardant and Grail. Lucence’s differentiators embrace its proprietary amplicon-sequencing, which examines particular genomic areas for variations, together with mutations linked to most cancers. The corporate describes its checks as a “Swiss Military knife,” as a result of it may be used for most cancers screening, diagnoses, therapy alternatives and monitoring.
In a press release, Dr. Kelvin Loh, the CEO-designate of IHH Healthcare, stated “liquid biopsy is a game-changer in our endeavor to supply most cancers remedies with higher, value-driven outcomes via exact therapy alternatives and extra inexpensive care. Our funding in Lucence will present IHH sufferers with higher entry to this superior expertise.”
