Freenome Secures $160 Million Series B Funding to Advance Multi-Omic Blood-Based Platform for Early Cancer Detection

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) learned that on July 24, 2019, Freenome, a prominent company in the field of early cancer screening in the United States, announced the completion of its $160 million Series B financing round. The round was led by RA Capital and Polaris Partners, with CEC CAPITAL participating as a co-investor.

Other institutions participating in the co-investment include Perceptive Advisors, funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Roche Venture Fund, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, BrightEdge Ventures under the American Cancer Society, as well as the company’s existing investors: Andreessen Horowitz, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Data Collective Venture Capital, Section 32, and Verily Life Sciences (a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. focused on life sciences and healthcare).

As of the completion of this financing round, Freenome has raised a cumulative total of $238 million. The company will utilize these funds to further advance its cancer early screening program based on a multi-omics blood testing platform. This multi-omics blood testing platform enables multi-cancer screening and facilitates new drug development. Freenome plans to conduct a pivotal validation study for its colorectal cancer early screening test and, through a parallel review process, simultaneously submit marketing applications for the test to both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Additionally, the company intends to further strengthen its laboratory infrastructure and software systems to meet future development needs.

Gabe Otte, CEO of Freenome, stated, “We are fortunate to have a group of investors who are seasoned professionals with extensive experience in the biotechnology and healthcare sectors. We share a common vision: to make early cancer screening a routine test. Furthermore, we warmly welcome several strategic investors who share this vision to join us. Each member of this team brings insights, expertise, and collaborative opportunities, which will enable us to accelerate the advancement of this initiative aimed at improving public health.”

“Freenome’s work holds immense promise and potential,” said Bob Crutchfield, Managing Director of BrightEdge, the charitable foundation affiliated with the American Cancer Society. “We look forward to our investment in Freenome accelerating the widespread adoption of its screening technologies and better serving cancer patients.”

Mr. Gabe Otte added, “Since our founding in 2014, we have been focused on building an interdisciplinary team to realize our ambitious vision for the future: significantly reducing cancer mortality through appropriate treatment plans guided by early screening and blood test results. We presented encouraging clinical data at this year’s Digestive Disease Week, where our cell-free DNA (cfDNA) assay and machine learning approach demonstrated high sensitivity and specificity in a cohort of patients with early-stage colorectal cancer. The proceeds from this financing will enable us to conduct subsequent validation studies to secure regulatory approval for our colorectal cancer screening program, and to expand our platform to other cancers or immune-mediated diseases in the future.”

Freenome’s multi-omics platform can detect key biological signals through routine blood tests. In nature, the molecular subtypes of cancer exhibit extensive heterogeneity, making accurate diagnosis challenging. Freenome’s platform combines the analysis of cell-free DNA, methylation, and proteins with advanced computational biology and machine learning techniques to identify various mutational features and integrate this information, thereby improving the accuracy of early cancer screening. This strategy leverages multidimensional perspectives, including tumor and immune-derived signals, to assist in early cancer screening, rather than relying solely on simple tumor markers, thus avoiding the oversight of early-stage tumor characteristics. Freenome has selected colorectal cancer as its first diagnostic product, which is the second deadliest cancer in the United States. Data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program conducted by the National Cancer Institute shows that the five-year survival rate for colorectal cancer is 90% if detected at an early stage, compared to only 14% if detected at a late stage.

“For metastatic cancer, the most cost-effective and effective approach is early detection. When tumors are still small and localized, we can cure them through surgery. It is precisely this vision that led us to invest in Freenome,” said Peter Kolchinsky, Managing Partner at RA Capital. “Freenome’s multi-omics platform is unlike any technology we have seen before, and we believe it can fulfill the long-held aspiration of achieving early detection and treatment of cancer through blood tests.”

“The only way to make meaningful progress in the fight against cancer is to integrate different disciplines and work toward a common goal. Freenome has built a world-class interdisciplinary team comprising molecular biologists, computational biologists, machine learning scientists, and engineers,” said Amir Nashat, Managing Partner at Polaris Partners. “Having witnessed Freenome’s significant advances in early cancer detection, we are delighted to continue partnering with them on this journey.”

Freenome is a biotechnology company that has pioneered the most comprehensive multi-omics platform for early cancer detection. By combining deep expertise in molecular biology with advanced computational biology and machine learning techniques, it identifies disease-related patterns from billions of circulating cell-free biomarkers. Freenome is developing simple and accurate blood-based tests for early cancer detection and plans to integrate this actionable approach into healthcare systems to enable a feedback loop between machine learning in medicine and computational science.

Freenome’s novel research achievements include a featured presentation titled “Application of Machine Learning in Early Diagnosis of Colorectal Cancer” at Digestive Disease Week in the United States, and a featured presentation titled “Predicting Gene Expression Using cfDNA Fragment Coverage” at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Freenome is headquartered in South San Francisco, California. For more information about Freenome, please visit www.freenome.com; to view open positions, please visit freenome.com/careers.

Freenome is developing simple and accurate blood-based tests for early cancer detection by using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify disease-related patterns among billions of circulating cell-free biomarkers. Freenome’s AI-assisted research underpins a series of rigorous clinical development and validation studies across various cancer types. The first product from this program, AI-EMERGE, will focus on the early detection of colorectal cancer.