Precede Biosciences Secures $57M Series A Financing to Accelerate Precision Drug Development with Blood-Based Transcriptional Profiling Platform

Text | Li Nana

Precede Biosciences is a biotechnology company headquartered in Massachusetts, USA, dedicated to increasing the success rate of drug development and contributing to a future where every patient can receive rapid, minimally invasive diagnostics and treatments precisely tailored to the biological characteristics of their disease.

On October 7, Precede Biosciences announced that it had secured $57 million in Series A financing. This round of funding was co-led by 5AM Ventures and Lilly Asia Ventures, with participation from Illumina Ventures, Bristol Myers Squibb, Osage University Partners, and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). The company plans to use the proceeds from this financing to deploy its developed platform on a large scale to inform drug development, while accelerating the development of blood-based clinical tests to advance the precise use of cancer drugs in clinical practice.

Precede Biosciences is breaking down barriers in precision medicine and redefining what can be learned from a simple blood draw.

The company has launched a groundbreaking blood-based method to uncover the transcriptional biology that determines disease — a first in the diagnostic field. Precede Biosciences' whole-genome platform can utilize a single milliliter (1 mL) of plasma, employing advanced proprietary molecular biology and machine learning techniques to analyze circulating chromatin and the DNA methylome. This provides a dynamic and information-rich landscape of approximately 20,000 gene promoters, around 1 million gene enhancers, and roughly 50,000 CpG islands, resolving the dynamic activation of individual genes and pathways in diseased tissues.

Over the past decade, genomic liquid biopsy (LBx) technologies have focused on somatic mutations, impacting treatment decisions for millions of patients and contributing to the success of numerous targeted oncology drug development programs. However, these technologies are limited to cancer and cannot adequately guide treatment decisions based on transcriptionally regulated disease targets (such as HER2 and ER in breast cancer), nor address emerging disease targets in new modalities like antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Existing technologies are further limited by their inability to assess the dynamic impact of treatments on relevant targets and pathways. Among current and emerging LBx platforms, Precede Biosciences' platform enables the direct acquisition of interpretable gene-level and pathway-level biological information across the entire genome, using just one milliliter of plasma to elucidate a patient’s biological state at any given time.

Precede's platform has undergone extensive testing and has now generated more than 7,000 whole-genome disease transcription maps for cancer and various other diseases. The first set of scientific data from the platform has been accepted for oral presentation at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2023 Congress, held in October, and will be presented by one of the company’s scientific founders. Currently, the company is actively collaborating with drug developers to accelerate the development of precision medicines by identifying biological characteristics associated with treatment response and drug resistance, as well as discovering new targets related to disease biological mechanisms. Precede's platform is available as a Research Use Only (RUO) platform for drug developers and academic researchers.

Editor | Hai Ruojing