Epic Sciences has raised $43m in first close of its Series F financing round led by Arsenal Capital Partners to expedite commercial launch of DefineMBC, its blood-based test for metastatic breast cancer characterisation.
Other existing investors including Deerfield Management, Blue Ox Healthcare Partners, and Labcorp also supported the investment.
Epic Sciences also intends to utilise the funds to expand its operations in areas like data analytics infrastructure and single-cell sequencing.
DefineMBC has been designed to provide a comprehensive profile of metastatic breast cancer that includes cell-based and cell-free analysis when tissue biopsy results are not available.
Epic Sciences president and CEO Lloyd Sanders said: “We are extremely proud to have a world-class group of strategic partners backing us to meet the growing demand for Epic’s liquid biopsy offerings.
“We are continuing to innovate testing for both the research and clinical markets. Our biopharma partners are driving our presence into drug development efforts and an increasing number of clinical trials, while we continue to see growing excitement from practicing clinical oncologists for DefineMBC and future tests.”
The company stated that the multi-analyte methods of DefineMBC have showed good accuracy, specificity, precision, and sensitivity in detecting circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and assessing protein expression (HER2, ER).
It also showed good performance in determining intra-cell copy number variations (CNV) in individual CTCs as well as in identifying single nucleotide variants (SNVs), indels, fusions, and CNVs from plasma-based cell-free DNA analysis.
Simultaneously, the company appointed Arsenal Healthcare Advisory Board chair James Rothman and GE Healthcare former chief scientist Nobel Laureate to its Board of Directors.
