Precede debuts with $57 million to transform precision medicine

Precede Biosciences emerged from stealth on Thursday with $57 million in seed and Series A financing. The liquid biopsy company, born out of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has developed a genome-wide platform that uses a small amount of plasma and machine learning to provide researchers and physicians with insights into the biology of a patient's disease. It plans to initially address applications in oncology.

CEO Rehan Verjee said the company is focused on guiding treatment decisions. "Our platform is a true first for the field as it enables comprehensive profiling of dynamic disease-site biology at the gene and pathway level from a simple blood draw," he explained.

Precede was supported in its seed round by Dana-Farber's venture arm, Binney Street Capital, and 5AM Ventures, which also co-led the Series A funding with Lilly Asia Ventures. Bristol Myers Squibb, Illumina Ventures, Osage University Partners and Qatar Investment Authority also participated in the latest round.

Existing genomic liquid biopsy technologies focus on somatic mutations, whereas Precede says its platform provides access to directly interpretable gene- and pathway-level biology genome-wide, and can shed light on a patient's biological state from a single mL of plasma. The platform has generated over 7000 genome-wide disease transcriptional profiles across cancers and numerous other diseases and conditions. The first scientific data from the platform will be presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) congress later this month.

Partnering with drug developers

Meanwhile, the start-up indicated that it is actively collaborating with drugmakers to accelerate the development of precision medicines by determining the biology associated with response and resistance to treatment and by detecting novel targets mechanistically linked to disease biology. Precede is also developing blood-based clinical tests to advance precision use of cancer medicines in clinical practice. Verjee said the company is interested in developing pan-cancer tests, but will first address breast and lung cancers.

Last week, Harbinger Health secured $140 million in Series B funding to advance its blood-based screening platform to detect early-stage cancers.

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