NEW YORK – Cancer diagnostics company C2i Genomics said on Thursday that it has raised $100 million in a financing round led by Casdin Capital with participation from NFX, Duquesne Family Office, Section 32, iGlobe Partners, Driehaus Capital, Silver Lake, Alexandria Real Estate, and existing investors The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, Gordon Asset Management, and LionBird. The financing was executed as a convertible note with two tranches of $50 million.
The company said it will use the funding to accelerate the clinical development and commercialization of its C2-Intelligence Platform, a cancer diagnostics system that uses artificial intelligence pattern recognition and whole-genome analysis to quickly and accurately detect minimal residual disease in cancer patients.
C2i said physicians can use its technology to find trace amounts of persistent or recurrent cancer much earlier and at far lower levels than they could before, and that its cloud-based technology can then provide actionable insights into disease progression in as little as one week. The company also claims its platform is up to 100 times more sensitive than competing platforms.
The company raised $12 million in a Series A round last June, which it planned to use to develop and clinically validate its personalized, real-time tool for monitoring recurrence and treatment response for various types of solid cancers — at the time, the platform was called MRDetect. The company was launched as a commercial venture between New York Genome Center (NYGC) and Weill Cornell Medicine researchers in August 2019 and is exclusively licensing the technology from the two institutes.
According to a company representative, the C2-Intelligence Platform uses MRDetect as its core technology but also includes the cloud-based diagnostics service.
The platform is currently being used for both clinical and drug development research in the National Cancer Centre Singapore, Aarhus University Hospital, NYU Langone Health, and Lausanne University Hospital, among other places, the company added.
C2i is also seeking regulatory approvals and reimbursement for the platform and plans to use part of the new financing to expand its partnerships with pharmaceutical companies in order to accelerate the development of novel cancer treatments and optimize the timing of treatment delivery based on recurrence detection.