AQTUAL

For most of liquid biopsy’s history, the goal was to strip away background “noise” in a blood sample to catch a faint cancer signal. Aqtual, Inc. looked at that same discarded static and reached the opposite conclusion: it was information. The Hayward, California company built a platform to amplify it.

Aqtual is a precision-medicine company developing blood-based tests for chronic disease and oncology. Its proprietary active-chromatin cell-free DNA (cfDNA) platform measures epigenetics, gene regulation and transcriptomics from a single blood draw — capturing circulating chromatin rather than only the DNA sequence. According to the company, it is the first assay to integrate DNA, epigenetic regulation and protein-DNA binding in one blood-based test.

The practical promise is specific. Instead of detecting that disease exists, Aqtual aims to reveal how a given patient’s biology is behaving right now — which tissues are active, which regulatory switches are flipped, and, ultimately, which therapy is most likely to work. Its first commercial product targets rheumatoid arthritis, where patients can spend months cycling through biologics before finding one that helps.

Where a standard cfDNA test reads sequence, Aqtual reads regulation. By capturing active chromatin circulating in blood, a single assay surveys the control layer of the genome — the promoters, enhancers and binding sites that decide which genes are switched on. The scale of that survey is the platform’s core differentiator.

Aqtual’s July 2025 Series B was oversubscribed, drawing new investors Bold Capital and Bold Longevity Growth Fund alongside returning backers Genoa Ventures, Manta Ray Ventures and Yu Galaxy. The round funds the push to commercialize the rheumatoid arthritis test and scale the platform.

The team of roughly 32 spans molecular biology, data science and clinical development — a deliberately small group given the platform’s enormous surface area. In 2024 the company added medical, translational-research and data-integrity executives, including Maggie Louie, PhD as VP of Translational Research and Strategic Partnerships.

Aqtual sits at the intersection of liquid biopsy, epigenomics and precision medicine — a field crowded with cancer-detection players such as Guardant Health, Grail, Freenome and DELFI Diagnostics. Its differentiation is direction: rather than early cancer screening, Aqtual reads gene regulation to predict therapy response, and it opens in autoimmune disease rather than oncology.

The business model is B2B molecular diagnostics: clinically validated blood tests and biomarker classifiers sold to clinicians and health systems, with parallel potential in pharmaceutical partnerships for drug-response biomarkers. The wager is that a single platform reading the genome’s control layer can generalize across six disease areas — turning one assay into many products.