Suian Biotech Completes Multimillion-Yuan Angel Round of Financing

According to VCBeat, Shanghai Suian Biotechnology Co., Ltd. ("Suian Biotech") has closed its multimillion-yuan angel round of financing from private investment.

Through its unique detection nanotechnology of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), Suian Biotech fixed the long-term bottleneck of the CTC industry, which caused a lot of interest and concern of investment institutions. The company takes advantage of the special metabolic features of cancer cells, and the biophysical characteristics resulting from this, to realize the broad-spectrum, high-efficiency, high-sensitivity, and high-specificity of CTC detection.

Established in April 2019, Suian Biotech's detection nanotechnology was developed as early as 2012 and took shape in the laboratory in 2016. Recently, the company has launched a Pre-A round of financing hoping to raise 15 million yuan, with proceeds mainly for the development of CTC analytics equipment and the further improvement of the technical team.

In recent years, liquid biopsy for cancer detection has become a hot field, which was rated as one of the top 10 breakthrough technologies by MIT Technology Review in 2015 due to its advantages of rapid, simple, painless, and non-invasive.

The industry of liquid biopsy for cancer detection can be divided into the upstream of capture cells, gene amplification, reagent and instrument, the midstream of detection services, and the downstream of data. Many international pharmaceutical giants and venture capitalists have already targeted this hot field.

As for the upstream of cell capture, "the current mainstream approach is to use the differences in surface antigens between tumor cells and normal cells, to capture tumor cells by binding to antigens and antibodies, or to physically separate and capture tumor cells by the differences in cell size," Dr. Chen Bingdi, the founder of Suian Biotech, said. "What we're doing here is a completely different and innovative way of capturing CTC using differences in glucose metabolism between tumor cells and normal cells. Compared with the existing separation technology, this separation method can achieve higher efficiency, sensitivity and specificity. "

According to the clinical data of Suian Biotech, of 238 blood samples of cancer patients, 229 were positive, with a sensitivity higher than 96%. Of the 241 healthy patients, 232 were negative, with a specificity higher than 96%. In terms of capture efficiency, over 100 live CTCS can be captured from 1ml peripheral blood (solid tumor) on average, 2000 captured at the most.

At present, Suian Biotech is still focused on CTC technical services. After the development of automated instruments in the future, it will provide the market with products combining reagents and instruments.