Startup GeneCentric Diagnostics pulled in $5 million in new Series A financing, according to reports from The Herald-Sun and Dow Jones VentureWire, among other media organizations. The money will help the North Carolina startup advance further development of gene-based diagnostic products designed to enable personalized treatments.
Hatteras Venture Partners in Durham is a co-investor. Hatteras also seeded GeneCentric with $250,000 when it launched in 2011, The Herald-Sun said.
Plans call for using the money for trials to show the clinical usefulness of GeneCentric's diagnostics tech, CEO Myla Lai-Goldman told The Herald-Sun.
GeneCentric is spun out of technology developed at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, the company described on its website. Its Lung Subtype Platform (LSP) is a gene diagnostic tool that helps identify specific genetic lung cancer subtypes in patients to enable patient matches with the best possible treatments. GeneCentric said that LabCorp ($LH) licensed and developed LSP's first application and now offers it through its Integrated Oncology specialty testing business as HistoPlus: Lung Cancer.
There are more products in the works. GeneCentric noted on its website that it also has the Hypoxia Signature test, designed to spot patients that respond to anti-angiogenesis treatments, which would prevent the growth of blood vessels to fuel cancer tumor growth.
Further tests of the company's technology must prove its utility on a wider scale. But there are enormous opportunities as personalized medicine continues to draw increased focus in both drug development and diagnostics. In lung cancer diagnostics in particular, there have been a number of advances in the personalized medicine space.
New Jersey's Cancer Genetics ($CGIX), for example, inked a deal in June with AstraZeneca ($AZN) to supply biomarker testing tech for the drug company during drug trials in Central America and the Caribbean. Also in June, Roche's ($RHHBY) Ventana Medical Systems and MedImmune inked a deal to develop an assay to help test a MedImmune immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer. These deals are becoming more commonplace as testing for gene-specific drugs becomes more of the norm than the exception.
- read The Herald-Sun piece
- here's Dow Jones VentureWire's take