Freenome is a cancer screening test that promises to equip you with the tools to prevent diseases. Find out everything you need to know about Freenome’s screening today.
What Is Freenome?
Freenome is a cancer screening test that works in a non-invasive way to help you spot your risk of disease as early as possible.
The health technology company was founded in 2014. The goal of the company was “to reinvent disease management through early detection and intervention.”
Over the past three years of work, the company has been working to make cancer screening and diagnostics as accurate and accessible as possible.
Freenome Competition
Freenome has been in headlines lately for collecting $65 million in Series A funding, led by major investment firms like Andreesen Horowitz and Innovation Endeavors. The company has also made headlines for its young co-founder: 28-year old Gabriel Otte.
Andreessen Horowitz also led the company’s $5.5 million seed round in 2016. Other notable investors in the company include GV, Polaris Partners, and Spectrum 28.
As TechCrunch explains, “The amount of money speaks to the opportunity – as well as the competition – that Freenome is facing”.
Freenome faces competition from companies like Guardant Health, which offers non-invasive genomic sequencing tests for cancer screening. Guardant Health’s test requires just two vials of blood – and the company has raised $190 million to date.
There’s also Grail, a Venice, California-based cancer screening startup that was founded as a breakaway from DNA-sequencing industry giant Illumina.
That company is reportedly seeking to raise up to $1.7 billion in fresh funding to launch a large-scale clinical trial (you may have heard about Grail in early 2016, when the company raised $100 million in Series A funding from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other notable names).
Yes, a $65 million Series A funding round is impressive for Freenome – but the company has some big competition ahead of it.
So what makes Freenome’s cancer screening test different from its competitors? Let’s take a closer look at how it works.
How Does Freenome Test For Cancer?
Freenome is a liquid biopsy diagnosis platform that works by detecting the cell-free DNA sequencing of cancer.
Freenome doesn’t provide much information about its proprietary process online – or to the public in any other source. However, the company has repeatedly demonstrated that their technology works through blood sample testing at its South San Francisco-based lab.
The company claims to have tested “thousands of blood samples” to date, and they claim their tests outperform current screening tests on the market for four specific types of cancer:
With the new funding, Freenome plans to expand the clinical trial with the help of its 25 research partners, including the University of California San Diego and UCSF. They also plan to expand the number of cancers available for testing through the Freenome technology.
With lung cancer, for example, Freenome wants to be able to answer specific questions about lung cancer: like whether a test shows non-small-cell lung carcinoma or small cell lung carcinoma (the first type of cancer is much less responsive to chemotherapy).
Obviously, this affects the recommended treatment.
The plan is to test as many as 10,000 blood samples in the Freenome lab, and through the various research partners. They plan to reach that goal within the next 12 months.
Once those tests are complete, Freenome will potentially move on to talks with the appropriate regulatory bodies for approval for the general public, reports TechCrunch.
Freenome Summary
Ultimately, Freenome is the type of technology that could change the world by making it easier to spot, detect, and identify different types of cancer. With its new funding from Google and Andreessen Horowitz, Freenome can compete against some of the big players in the medical technology world – including other cancer screening test startups.
Stay tuned for more information about Freenome and their cancer screening test in the future.
