liquid-biopsy
(22)
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.'
Karius
Karius is a Redwood City, California life-sciences company that turns a single blood draw into a broad infectious-disease diagnosis. Its flagship Karius Test uses microbial cell-free DNA (mcfDNA) sequencing, metagenomics and AI to detect more than 1,000 pathogens - bacteria, DNA viruses, fungi and parasites - often within a day of receiving a sample. Founded in 2014 out of Stephen Quake's lab at Stanford, the company aims to give clinicians a fast, non-invasive alternative to invasive biopsies and slow cultures, with a focus on the immunocompromised patients who need answers most urgently.
Apostle Inc
Apostle Inc is a Pleasanton, California biotechnology company that develops nucleic acid isolation and preservation technologies for liquid biopsy. Its flagship magnetic-nanoparticle kit, Apostle MiniMax, extracts circulating cell-free DNA and RNA from blood for applications in early cancer detection, non-invasive prenatal testing, infectious disease research, and even astronaut biospecimen collection in commercial spaceflight. Founded in 2018 out of the Stanford StartX accelerator, the company sells reagents, automation instruments, and CLIA/CAP lab services to researchers and diagnostics developers worldwide.
Aqtual, Inc.
Aqtual, Inc. is a Hayward, California precision medicine company that reads epigenetics, gene regulation and transcriptomics from a single blood draw. Its proprietary active-chromatin cell-free DNA (cfDNA) platform captures circulating chromatin to survey hundreds of thousands of regulatory sites, integrating DNA, epigenetic regulation and protein-DNA binding in one blood-based assay. The company is first commercializing a test that predicts which therapy will work for rheumatoid arthritis patients, with a broader pipeline spanning oncology, immunology, cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological disease. Aqtual has raised roughly $47M to date, including a $31M Series B in July 2025.
ARNA Genomics US Inc.
ARNA Genomics US Inc. is a San Francisco-based biotechnology company developing multiomics liquid-biopsy technology for early cancer detection. Its lead assay, ARNA Breast, analyzes cell-free DNA and plasma enzyme activity from a routine blood draw to flag early-stage breast cancer, with proof-of-concept studies reporting sensitivity above 90%. Founded in 2013 and led by CEO Egor Melnikov, the company raised a $3.5M Series A in 2020 to fund clinical validation.
Predicine
Predicine is a molecular insights company advancing precision oncology through non-invasive, multi-omic liquid biopsy. Founded in 2015 by former Genentech scientist Shidong Jia, the company builds NGS-based assays that read cell-free DNA and RNA from blood and urine to detect cancer mutations, track minimal residual disease, and match patients to targeted therapies. Its flagship PredicineCARE urine cfDNA assay holds FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and is in premarket approval as a companion diagnostic in bladder cancer, developed in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson's Janssen.
InterVenn Biosciences
InterVenn Biosciences is a South San Francisco biotech building an AI-driven glycoproteomics platform that reads the sugar coatings on proteins to detect disease earlier. Its flagship blood test, GlycoKnow Ovarian, distinguishes ovarian cancer from benign pelvic masses with ~86% accuracy and went commercial in 2025. Founded in 2017 by Aldo Carrascoso with chemists Carolyn Bertozzi (Nobel Laureate) and Carlito Lebrilla, the company has raised roughly $244M, including a $201M Series C led by SoftBank in 2021.
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.
Alex Aravanis
Alex Aravanis is the CEO and co-founder of Moonwalk Biosciences, a precision epigenetics company he launched in 2024 with $57 million and Broad Institute scientist Feng Zhang. An engineer-turned-physician with degrees from UC Berkeley and Stanford, he co-founded the cancer early-detection company GRAIL, later returned to Illumina as Chief Technology Officer, and now wants to rewrite the 'software of the genome' without cutting a single strand of DNA.
ClearNote Health
ClearNote Health is a San Diego molecular diagnostics company building non-invasive, blood-based tests that detect high-mortality cancers early, when treatment works best. Spun out of Stephen Quake's Stanford lab in 2016 (originally as Bluestar Genomics), it pairs a proprietary 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) epigenomic platform with cell-free DNA analysis and machine learning. Its flagship Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test targets high-risk patients - including adults 50+ newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes - and the company is extending the approach to ovarian and multi-cancer detection.
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.
Dave Mullarkey
Dave Mullarkey is the CEO of ClearNote Health, a San Diego company that reads the chemical edits on your DNA to catch deadly cancers before symptoms show. A life-sciences operator who has shepherded three diagnostics and sequencing companies through scale-ups and acquisitions - Ariosa to Roche, Omniome to PacBio - he now leads the team behind the Avantect epigenomic blood tests for pancreatic and multi-cancer detection.
NVIGEN Inc.
NVIGEN Inc. is a Sunnyvale, California nanobiotechnology company that engineers multifunctional, biodegradable magnetic and fluorescent nanoparticles for biomedical research, diagnostics and therapeutics. Built on its proprietary nanoparticle-imaging-delivery (NID) and MagVigen platforms, NVIGEN makes reagents and assays that capture DNA, RNA, proteins and rare cells from a single blood or tissue sample - powering liquid biopsy, NGS/multiomics sample preparation, single-cell spatial sequencing, and targeted drug and cell therapy. Its products are used by researchers at more than 40 institutions worldwide.
Gajus Worthington
Gajus Worthington is a life sciences entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor who turned an idea for circuits that move fluid instead of electrons into Fluidigm, a microfluidics company he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO through its IPO and years as a public company. Today he is Chairman and CEO of Superfluid Dx, a South San Francisco company building a blood test that reads cell-free messenger RNA from the brain to diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier and more precisely. Between those chapters he served as COO of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, co-founded Kaizen Therapeutics and the ML/AI healthcare company StatOS, and became a Managing Partner at WRQ Sciences.
Superfluid Dx, Inc.
Superfluid Dx is a South San Francisco diagnostics company building a blood-based test for Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Its platform isolates cell-free messenger RNA (cf-mRNA) from a single tube of blood and pairs next-generation sequencing with RNA deconvolution and machine-learning analysis to read out organ-level biology - aiming to detect disease years earlier than conventional methods and to guide therapy. The company was formed in late 2023 when WRQ Sciences acquired and renamed Molecular Stethoscope, and is led by Fluidigm co-founder Gajus Worthington alongside Stanford bioengineer and serial founder Steve Quake.
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.
Tempus AI
Tempus AI is a Chicago-based health technology company that has built one of the world's largest libraries of clinical and molecular data, paired with an AI operating system that helps physicians and researchers make data-driven decisions in oncology, cardiology, radiology, and beyond. Founded in 2015 by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky after his wife's cancer diagnosis, the company sequences patient genomes, structures messy clinical records, and turns that data into diagnostics and AI tools used across a majority of U.S. academic medical centers. It went public on Nasdaq in June 2024 under the ticker TEM.
J. Seth Strattan
J. Seth Strattan, PhD is a General Partner at Two Bear Capital, a Whitefish, Montana-based venture capital firm investing at the crossroads of life sciences and technology. With a PhD in Structural Biology and a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, Strattan spent years at Stanford building and leading the engineering and data science teams behind landmark genomics consortia - ENCODE, the Human Cell Atlas, and the International Human Epigenomics Consortium - before pivoting to back the founders tackling biology's hardest problems. He is based in Silicon Valley, leads Two Bear Capital's Menlo Park office, and splits his remaining time between Montana and a family farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.
John Hanna
John W. Hanna is President and CEO of CareDx, Inc., the leading transplant patient diagnostics company based in Brisbane, California. Appointed in April 2024, he brings over two decades of executive leadership in molecular diagnostics and life sciences, including a decade at Veracyte and a stint as CEO of Apton Biosystems. At CareDx, he is executing a bold three-year plan targeting $500 million in revenue and 20% adjusted EBITDA by 2027, transforming the company from a single-test diagnostics business into a full clinical ecosystem for transplant centers worldwide.
Alec Ford
Alec Ford is the chief executive of Karius, a Redwood City genomics-diagnostics company that reads microbial cell-free DNA from a single tube of blood to identify more than a thousand pathogens. He took the job in October 2020 and led the company through a $100M Series C in May 2024.
Andrew Quong
Andrew Quong is President and CEO of InterVenn Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based precision diagnostics company unlocking the human glycoproteome through AI-powered platforms. With a PhD in Physics and over 30 years spanning national laboratories, academia, and biotech, Quong bridges the physical and computational sciences with clinical medicine. He led InterVenn's development of GlycoKnow Ovarian, a non-invasive blood-based liquid biopsy test for distinguishing ovarian cancer from benign masses, and has steered the company through key commercialization milestones including a $201M Series C raise in 2021.
Maneesh Jain
Maneesh Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a South San Francisco-based biotech company pioneering RNA-based blood tests to predict pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and preterm birth months before symptoms occur. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in life sciences and more than $1.5B in combined exits across five prior startups - including Ion Torrent (acquired by Life Technologies) and Cirina (acquired by GRAIL) - Jain trained at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and holds a BS from Caltech and a Master's in Applied Physics from Stanford. Mirvie has raised over $90 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, GV, General Catalyst, and the Gates Foundation, and received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its preeclampsia risk test in 2022.