molecular-diagnostics
(41)
Paul Billings
Paul Billings has spent four decades asking the same hard question from different seats: how do you turn genetic information into something useful without letting it become something dangerous?
Albert Luderer
He spent thirty years turning lab science into products doctors actually use. Now he is betting that a synthetic peptide can beat the antibody at its own game.
Amwise Diagnostic PTE. LTD.
Amwise Diagnostic is a Singapore- and Taipei-based cancer genomics company behind RecurIndex, a multi-gene test built specifically on the genomes of Asian breast cancer patients. It reads a tumor's genetic profile alongside clinical factors to estimate the five-year risk of local recurrence and distant metastasis, helping physicians and patients decide whether chemotherapy or radiotherapy is actually needed - and helping many avoid treatment they don't.
Pando Bioscience
Pando Bioscience is an AI-driven synthetic biology company that engineers better enzymes for the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries. It pairs a generative-AI design model with an ultra-high-throughput 'one-pot' screening platform that tests roughly 1,000 times more enzyme variants - about 75% faster and 80% cheaper than conventional methods - compressing the design-build-test-learn cycle to about one month. Founded in 2022 by former Ginkgo Bioworks scientists Will Cao and Yang Wang, Pando both improves customers' enzymes and builds its own proprietary enzyme assets, such as the Saiyan-Phi29 polymerase.
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.
Sasan Amini
Sasan Amini is the co-founder and CEO of Clear Labs, a San Carlos genomics company that turns next-generation DNA sequencing into a push-button diagnostic for food safety and infectious disease. An Iranian immigrant who left Tehran at 22, he earned a PhD in genomics at Princeton, worked in advanced research at Illumina, and in 2014 set out to make sequencing simple enough for any lab to run. When COVID-19 hit, Clear Labs pivoted its automated platform into SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and reached more than half of U.S. public health labs.
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.'
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.
Indi Molecular
Indi Molecular is a Culver City, California biotech developing a synthetic alternative to antibodies called Protein Catalyzed Capture (PCC) agents - small, stable cyclic peptides built with click chemistry that bind protein targets with antibody-like specificity while behaving like small-molecule drugs. Spun out of Caltech chemist James Heath's lab in 2013, the company applies its platform to targeted oncology therapeutics and PET imaging agents, aiming to reach targets long considered undruggable, including KRAS G12D pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer.
Pearl Diagnostics, Inc.
Pearl Diagnostics is a Baltimore-based in vitro diagnostics company spun out of Johns Hopkins University that develops non-invasive urine tests to detect life-threatening lung infections. Its proprietary Smart Antibody technology identifies circulating microbial extracellular vesicles, and its lead product, the MycoMEIA Aspergillus Assay, became the first urine-based test to win FDA 510(k) clearance for aiding diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis. The company raised an $11.2M Series A in March 2026 to commercialize in the US and expand across Europe.
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.
Clear Labs
Clear Labs is a San Carlos, California genomics company that builds Clear Dx, a fully automated next-generation sequencing platform. It turns whole genome sequencing - normally a slow, expert-heavy lab process - into a push-button diagnostic used by food manufacturers and public health labs to detect pathogens like Salmonella and Listeria, characterize SARS-CoV-2 and TB, and identify bacteria and fungi from clinical specimens, often with next-day results.
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.
Kryptos Biotechnologies, Inc.
Kryptos Biotechnologies is a Hayward, California life-sciences startup that reinvented the PCR machine around light. Its proprietary photothermal heating uses an optical thin film to convert light into precisely controlled heat, driving an Ultrafast Photonic PCR engine that runs 40 thermal-cycles in under 10 minutes. That engine powers Kuick, a sample-to-answer molecular diagnostics system that delivers lab-grade infectious-disease results at the point of care in roughly 20 minutes. Founded in 2017 and backed by a $10M Series A led by Osang Healthcare, Kryptos is pushing toward U.S. clinical trials and FDA clearance.
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.
Algorithmic Biologics
Algorithmic Biologics is a Bengaluru- and Delaware-based deep-tech company that treats molecular testing as an information-processing problem. Founded by molecular-computing researcher Dr. Manoj Gopalkrishnan, its patented Tapestry platform uses compressed sensing and combinatorial pooling to run large-scale DNA/RNA/protein tests with far fewer reactions - screening many samples at once and only zooming in where a signal exists. The approach first proved itself as an award-winning, regulator-approved COVID-19 pooling solution and now targets affordable genomics, multiplexed diagnostics, and accelerated assay design.
Mirvie
Mirvie is a South San Francisco biotech using cell-free RNA signatures and machine learning to predict pregnancy complications - preeclampsia, preterm birth, fetal growth restriction - months before symptoms appear. Its flagship product Encompass is a blood test built on a foundational study of nearly 11,000 pregnancies.
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.
Circular Genomics
Circular Genomics is a San Diego biotechnology company turning circular RNA (circRNA) into a new class of blood-based biomarkers for brain health. Spun out of the University of New Mexico in 2021, the company uses brain-enriched circRNAs that cross the blood-brain barrier and stay stable in whole blood to detect and predict neurological and psychiatric conditions, from Alzheimer's disease to major depressive disorder. Its goal is to replace guesswork in brain care with measurable, actionable data, starting with early Alzheimer's detection and SSRI treatment-response testing for depression.
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.
克睿基因 Cure Genetics
克睿基因 Cure Genetics is a clinical-stage biotech founded in Suzhou in 2016 that develops cell and gene therapies for solid tumors and genetic diseases. It runs two proprietary platforms: AIMS, an allogeneic CAR-NKT cell therapy approach aimed at hard-to-treat solid tumors, and VELP, a directed-evolution AAV vector platform that builds high-quality viral libraries for tissue-targeted gene delivery to the nervous system, heart, and kidney. Its lead programs include CGC729 (anti-CD70 CAR-NKT for renal cell carcinoma) and CGC-602 (a PD-1-IL-2v bispecific antibody).
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.
Geneoscopy
Geneoscopy is a St. Louis life-sciences company building noninvasive diagnostics that read RNA biomarkers in stool to prevent, detect, and treat gastrointestinal disease. Its flagship product, ColoSense, is the first FDA-approved multi-target stool RNA (mt-sRNA) test for colorectal cancer screening in adults 45 and older, designed to lift screening compliance by replacing the colonoscopy prep and the clinic visit with a kit that arrives in the mail. Founded by siblings Andrew and Erica Barnell, the company is extending its RNA platform from cancer screening into inflammatory bowel disease.
Inflammatix, Inc.
Inflammatix is a Sunnyvale, California molecular diagnostics company that reads the body's own immune response instead of hunting for the pathogen. Its FDA-cleared TriVerity test measures 29 host mRNAs from a blood sample and, using machine-learning algorithms, returns three scores in about 30 minutes: likelihood of bacterial infection, likelihood of viral infection, and overall illness severity. Run on the company's benchtop Myrna instrument, it is built for emergency and critical-care clinicians who need to decide fast whether a patient is heading toward sepsis. Spun out of Stanford in 2016, the company has raised more than $205M.
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.
Pleno Inc.
Pleno Inc. is a San Diego multi-omic instrument company rebuilding the economics of biological target detection. Its RAPTOR platform, powered by proprietary Hypercoding technology borrowed from telecommunications signal processing, can detect up to 10,000 targets in a single sample at PCR-like speed and cost. Founded by serial entrepreneur Pieter van Rooyen, the company is moving from R&D into commercial launch with backing from Deerfield Management and Foresite Capital.
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.