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Liquid Biopsies - a technology to watch
I wonder if watching individual career moves, especially of prominent researchers, can be a good signal on where the industry is headed. While we all scour the 13F filings of hedge funds and ARKG to see what stocks these investment managers favor - we have to remember that like venture capitalists, they get to spread their bets across a number of companies and even industries.
Entrepreneurs and workers are heavily concentrated in their choice of job and employer - which makes the risk/reward tradeoff much steeper.
From Stat+ (link), we learn that Peter Bach is joining a liquid biopsy startup company making blood tests to detect cancer.
Like Atul Gawande, Bach is a medical researcher with a public following, notably for his writing and interviews on the craziness of our medical system, and how it funds and prices drugs.
60 minutes interviewed Bach on cancer pricing here:
From Stat+,
Bach, 56, the director of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, will become the chief medical officer of Delfi Diagnostics, a Baltimore startup that raised $100 million from a syndicate of investors in January to develop a new form of a technology, known as liquid biopsy, that can detect fragments of cancer DNA in the bloodstream.
Delfi was founded by Victor Velculescu, a Johns Hopkins cancer genomics researcher who is now the company’s CEO. Several companies, including Grail and Thrive Earlier Detection, which is now part of Exact Sciences, had already developed tests that aim to detect cancer through bits of altered DNA shed by tumors into the bloodstream.
Most of these tests look for alterations in genes, or in the methylation patterns present on the DNA. But Velculescu believed it would be possible to detect cancer more easily by how fragmented, or broken up, the DNA was, a pattern that could be detected using machine learning. The advantage is that samples are much easier to prepare, he says, and the DNA needs to be sequenced at lower accuracy, lowering costs. A preliminary report on the approach was published in Nature in 2019.
Velculesclu, in an interview with STAT, compared the other approaches to looking for a pebble dropping into a pond by looking for the pebble. “When you think of this technology, we’re looking essentially at the edge of this pond and we can see the ripples that are happening.” This, he said, means that the technology may be more cost-effective.
Bach said that even though he will now focus most of his time on lung cancer, he will still speak up about other topics. “The expectation on both sides is I’m still a U.S. citizen who can express my mind if I think I have serious things to say about what is going on in the U.S. health care system,” Bach said.
Two leading public liquid biopsy providers are Guardant Health and Exact Sciences.
Here is the 1Y chart for Guardant compared to Exact Sciences:
Anyone here invested in $GH?
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Interesting article here on the rivalry between $GH and $EXAS :
https://www.medtechdive.com/news/exact-sciences-guardant-rivalry-in-colorectal-testing-market-heats-up/595177/
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