cancer-diagnostics
(24)
The Cancer Clue That DNA Leaves Behind
Lucence built a blood test around a small but consequential idea: tumors speak in RNA as well as DNA. The difficult part was not only hearing the signal - it was making doctors, labs and Medicare listen.
Egor Melnikov Bet a Founder’s Life on a Family Idea
An economist from a Russian science town turned his father’s unfinished research into a decade-long biotech company. The useful lesson is not romance. It is his stubborn method: narrow the question, protect the idea, and keep earning the next experiment.
Brian Slingerland's Long Game Started With a Craigslist Ad
A finance graduate answered a housing problem with a classified ad and found a scientist instead. Two decades later, Brian Slingerland is still building companies where business discipline meets difficult biology.
Christian Apfel Is Betting on the Tumor, Not the Spreadsheet
The physician-scientist behind SageMedic built his career turning clinical uncertainty into compact decisions. Now he is applying the same habit to functional precision oncology, angel investing and the slow work of changing a standard.
Chris Apfel Is Building a Second Opinion for the Tumor Itself
The physician-scientist behind a globally used clinical score is now betting that live tumor evidence can make cancer treatment decisions less abstract, one microtumor at a time.
The Health Company Hiding in Your Kitchen, Your Lab and Under Your Skin
Abbott built a $44.3 billion business by showing up everywhere health becomes measurable - from a breakfast shake to a glucose curve to a repaired heart valve. Its breadth is the strategy, and the complication.
Sanjeev Saxena
Sanjeev Saxena is a serial medical-device entrepreneur and engineer who has spent more than 30 years trying to move cancer screening out of expensive central labs and into villages, clinics and pop-up sites. He is founder, CEO and CTO of Harae Dx Corp., a Pleasanton, California startup building a low-cost, portable, automated cancer detection system based on lab-on-a-disc microfluidics. Earlier he founded POC Medical Systems, whose MammoAlert and Pandora CDx platforms brought portable breast-cancer screening to emerging markets, and he co-founded Scanis, Actis Biologics and Telesto Diagnostics. He has raised more than $70 million across his ventures and sits on the board of the Texas Tech Research Park.
Shidong Jia
Shidong Jia, MD, PhD, is the founder and global CEO of Predicine, a Silicon Valley precision-oncology company building multi-omic liquid biopsy tests that read cancer from blood and urine. Trained as a physician-scientist at Harbin Medical University, Peking Union Medical College, Dana-Farber and Harvard, he ran oncology biomarker strategy at Genentech before leaving to start Predicine in 2015. His pitch is simple: precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine, built 'From Pharma, For Pharma.'
Qritive
Qritive is a Singapore-based healthtech company building AI-powered digital pathology software that helps pathologists detect, grade and classify cancer from whole-slide images. Its Pantheon platform digitizes the entire histopathology workflow, and a suite of hardware-agnostic AI modules - covering prostate, colon, breast, gastric, lymph node metastasis and immunohistochemistry - assist pathologists in reaching faster, more consistent diagnoses. The company sells to hospitals, pathology labs and pharmaceutical partners across Asia-Pacific, the US and the Middle East.
Virtue Diagnostics
Virtue Diagnostics is a platform-based in vitro diagnostics (IVD) company headquartered in Singapore, with manufacturing in Suzhou, China and clinical operations in Beijing. Founded in 2019, it develops affordable diagnostic instruments and reagents across chemiluminescence, clinical chemistry, hematology, clinical mass spectrometry, multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) and molecular diagnostics, aiming to serve patients through every stage of disease - from early screening and diagnosis to treatment monitoring and minimal residual disease management. Its strategy centers on localized innovation and expansion in emerging markets including China, Singapore, Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company closed a US$100 million Series B round in January 2022 led by Sequoia China and Morningside Ventures.
Ataraxis AI
Ataraxis AI is a New York-based precision-oncology company building AI-native cancer diagnostics. Founded in 2022 by physician-scientist Jan Witowski and AI researcher Krzysztof Geras, it developed Kestrel, a digital-pathology foundation model trained on hundreds of millions of tissue images. Its flagship platform, Ataraxis Breast, reads standard pathology slides to predict recurrence risk and estimate whether an individual patient will benefit from chemotherapy - reported to be roughly 30% more accurate than the current standard of care - returning results within about an hour and without additional tissue procedures.
BostonGene
BostonGene is a Waltham, Massachusetts biotechnology company that applies AI-driven multiomics to cancer. Its Tumor Portrait platform integrates DNA and RNA sequencing with immune and tumor-microenvironment analysis into a single test, producing molecular profiles that help oncologists select therapies and help pharmaceutical partners design trials, identify biomarkers, and accelerate drug development. Founded in 2015 and led by CEO Andrew Feinberg, the company reached unicorn status in 2022.
Morphle Labs Inc.
Morphle Labs is a deep-tech healthcare automation company building robotic and AI-driven imaging systems for cancer diagnostics. Founded in 2017 and now operating between Bengaluru and New York, it combines robotics, optical engineering, and neural-network AI to automate the historically manual steps of histology - from tissue sectioning to whole-slide scanning to remote reporting. Its product line spans the RoboTome robotic microtome, the MorphoLens family of whole-slide scanners, and the HemoLens hematology scanners, giving pathology labs an end-to-end digital workflow at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.
Harae Dx Corp.
Harae Dx Corp. is a Pleasanton, California medical device startup building what it calls the world's smallest portable, automated system for early cancer detection. Founded in 2021 by serial medtech entrepreneur Sanjeev Saxena, the company pairs a proprietary lab-on-a-disc centrifugal microfluidic platform with a biomarker panel exclusively licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to deliver a non-invasive early breast cancer test that returns results in roughly 30 minutes - without shipping samples to a third-party lab. Backed by SOSV/HAX and Fusion Fund, Harae Dx aims to make low-cost cancer screening portable enough to run at the point of care.
SageMedic Corp.
SageMedic Corp. is a Redwood City, California biotech and CLIA-accredited laboratory advancing functional precision oncology. Its flagship product, the SAGE Oncotest, grows hundreds of live 3D microtumors from a patient's own fresh tumor biopsy and tests them against a panel of FDA-approved chemotherapies and targeted drugs, predicting which treatments a tumor will resist or respond to within 7-10 days - independently of genetic mutations. The company reports actionable results in 88% of cases versus roughly 26% for genomic tests. Founded by physician-scientists Dr. Chris Apfel and Dr. Brigitte Apfel, SageMedic aims to more than double a patient's odds of receiving the most effective therapy the first time.
Rohit Hiwale
Rohit Hiwale is the co-founder and CEO of Morphle Labs, a Y Combinator W20 deep-tech company building robotic microtomes and high-throughput whole slide scanners for digital pathology. An IIT Kharagpur computer science graduate and second-time founder with prior engineering stints at Yahoo, WalmartLabs and Rippling, he is trying to automate the physical and imaging bottlenecks at the core of cancer diagnostics.
Arima Genomics
Arima Genomics is a Carlsbad, California biotech commercializing Hi-C technology - sequencing methods that reveal the 3D structure of the genome. Its research kits help scientists assemble chromosome-scale genomes and study chromatin architecture, while its clinical brand Aventa Genomics turns the same proximity-ligation chemistry into FFPE-friendly cancer tests for fusions, rearrangements, and other structural variants conventional NGS often misses.
Valar Labs
Valar Labs is a Palo Alto precision-oncology company building AI tests that read the pathology slides already made during routine cancer care. Its Vesta platform applies proprietary foundation models to standard H&E-stained tissue images to predict how individual patients will respond to therapy - starting with bladder cancer, where it forecasts whether a patient is likely to benefit from BCG treatment and stratifies the risk of recurrence and progression. Founded in 2021 by Stanford AI researchers, the company has raised $26M total and earned the FDA's first Breakthrough Device Designation for an AI digital-pathology prognostic test in bladder cancer.
Aihua Fu
Aihua Fu is a nanobiotechnologist and the co-founder, President and CEO of NVIGEN Inc., a San Jose nanobiotechnology company building molecularly engineered magnetic and fluorescent nanoparticles for cancer detection and personalized medicine. Trained as a chemist under Nobel-track nanoscience pioneer A. Paul Alivisatos at UC Berkeley and as a postdoc at Stanford, she turned quantum-dot and magnetic-bead research into commercial tools for liquid biopsy, cfDNA extraction, single-cell sequencing and circulating tumor cell capture. Her flagship NVIGEN X and NERNST-Seq platforms aim to read DNA, RNA, protein and cell signals together to predict cancer recurrence early and guide therapy.
GeneCentric Therapeutics
GeneCentric Therapeutics is a Durham, North Carolina precision-oncology company that reads cancer's gene activity, not just its mutations, from a tube of blood. Its proprietary EXpressCT technology infers RNA-based gene expression signatures from cell-free DNA fragmentomics, and its GenomicsNext platform combines that expression read-out with DNA variant detection in a single liquid biopsy. The company also markets PurIST, an RNA expression subtyping test for pancreatic cancer. Founded in 2011 out of gene-expression research at UNC, GeneCentric partners with biopharma and commercial labs to bring richer, blood-based biomarkers into routine cancer care.
Michael Milburn
Michael V. Milburn is the CEO and President of GeneCentric Therapeutics, a Durham, North Carolina biotech building RNA-based liquid biopsy tools that read a tumor's behavior from a single tube of blood. A structural biologist by training, he helped solve the first crystal structures of the Ras cancer protein at Berkeley in the late 1980s, then spent decades building research engines at Sirtris, Plexxikon, and Metabolon before taking the top job at GeneCentric in 2019. His current bet: that the fragments of DNA shed by tumors carry enough information to infer gene expression, not just mutations, turning a blood draw into a near-complete molecular portrait of cancer.
Sungwon Lim
Dr. Sungwon Lim is the CEO and Co-Founder of ImpriMed, Inc., a Palo Alto-based precision oncology company that combines live cancer cell testing with AI to predict which drugs will work best for an individual patient's cancer - before treatment begins. Having raised $23M in Series A funding led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, ImpriMed has helped treat over 6,500 dogs with blood cancers across 130+ specialty hospitals in the US, Canada, England, and France, while publishing clinical data showing AI predictions tripled survival rates in relapsed B-cell lymphoma. A Stanford-trained bioengineer inspired by the potential of one powerful medicine to save millions, Lim pioneered a pivot into veterinary oncology as a proving ground before expanding the platform to human cancer treatment.
Anirudh Joshi
Anirudh Joshi is the co-founder and CEO of Valar Labs, a Palo Alto-based AI oncology company building tools that let doctors predict whether a specific cancer treatment will work before a patient wastes months on the wrong one. A biomedical engineer trained at Georgia Tech and Stanford, he previously built AI at Microsoft, PathAI, and Curai before co-founding Valar in 2021 with teammates from Stanford's AI in Medicine group. Valar raised $26M total, landing a $22M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and DCVC in 2024, and its flagship test Vesta — predicting BCG therapy response in bladder cancer — is now live at 20 U.S. hospitals. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare 2025.
Tom Willis
Tom Willis, PhD, is a genomics entrepreneur with more than 20 years of company-building experience who became CEO of Arima Genomics in June 2025. A Yale and Stanford physicist turned biotech serial founder, he co-invented Molecular Inversion Probe technology, built two genomics companies from the ground up - ParAllele BioScience (acquired by Affymetrix) and Sequenta (whose ClonoSEQ assay became NCCN-standard for leukemia and lymphoma residual disease testing) - then spent a decade as Venture Partner at Illumina Ventures before stepping in to lead Arima, a company pioneering 3D genomics for cancer diagnostics.