Epic Sciences Raises $30M to Advance Cancer Diagnostics

Murali Prahalad

It’s been about six years since San Diego’s Epic Sciences was founded to commercialize technology that Peter Kuhn and others developed at The Scripps Research Institute for detecting and analyzing circulating tumor cells.

In more recent years, the company has moved rapidly to create an entirely new business based on its diagnostic technology. Epic Sciences says it has established about 30 partnerships and research collaborations with both pharmaceutical companies and academic scientists, and its technology is being used to analyze many types of cancer in thousands of patients. Over the past year, the company’s workforce has doubled, from 30 to about 60 employees.

Things must be going well, because today Epic Sciences says it has raised $30 million in Series C funding. Three existing investors—Domain Associates, Roche Venture Fund, and Pfizer Venture Investments—have returned to increase the size of their bet, along with new investors that include RusnanoMedInvest (RMI) and Arcus Ventures.

“It’s a validation by a very discerning set of investors in technology with the sensitivity to identify very rare cancer cells from a tube of blood,” says Murali Prahalad, Epic Sciences CEO.

In a separate statement, Epic Sciences named Greg Lucier, the former chairman and CEO of Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies, as a new director and board chairman. Lucier oversaw the $15.4 billion sale of Life Technologies to Thermo Fisher Scientific earlier this year, and is expected to help guide the company’s commercialization strategy.

Cancer Diagnostics
Epic Sciences can identify and characterize circulating tumor cell (red dot) among millions of normal cells

Epic Sciences says its technology is sufficiently sensitive to screen the size, shape, and staining pattern of every nucleated cell in a blood sample that contains about 30 million nucleated cells. The company says this “no cell behind” approach is accurate enough to pinpoint the five circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in such a sample. The process uses antibodies that fluoresce in the presence of keratins, filament-forming proteins found in all CTCs, combined with high-definition imaging to help analyze the fluorescing cells. To capture and analyze all types of CTCs, the company says it uses more than 90 parameters, including molecular assays that differentiate the type of cancer cells based on protein expression or genomic markers, and high-performance computing to help analyze and manage the data.

“What we have found at Epic is that cancer is a very heterogeneous disease, and so are the

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.