cancer-diagnostics
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.