Perthera, which focuses on precision cancer analysis, has garnered $8.7 million in Series A financing that was led by Pilot Growth Equity.
As part of the fundraising, Neil Callahan, a co-founder and managing director of Pilot Growth Equity, joined Perthera's board.
The company, which is based in Tyson's Corner, VA, touts precision cancer analysis (PCA) as providing a more accurate understanding of a patient's cancer that allows for more personalized treatment options for each patient. Perthera's technology provides detailed full molecular information about cancer tumors, which is the first step of a "precision" or "personalized" approach to medical treatments for cancer patients.
"One major change in the foreseeable future will be that a PCA will be the first step undertaken by people diagnosed with cancer just as today an MRI is the first step of those who need detailed pictures of a body's structural and organic systems," Andrew Mignatti, Perthera's CEO, said in a statement. "That detailed level of analysis will, in turn, lead to the identification of specific therapies, including those in clinical trials, appropriate for individual patients."
Precision medicine is a quickly growing sector in the medical field.
On Tuesday, IBM Watson Health ($IBM) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced they are teaming up to expand access to precision medicine for 10,000 American veterans with cancer. The announcement was made at Vice President Joe Biden's National Cancer Moonshot Summit.
The VA will use IBM's Watson for Genomics technology to scale up its existing precision medicine program, and intends to sequence the genomes of about 100 people per month, eventually ramping up to about 800 per month over the next two years,
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