trial. She estimates that about 100 patients would participate, but says the actual total will depend on the results of Lynx’s current prospective clinical study. If the pivotal trial goes as Pak hopes, her company would turn its attention to getting premarket approval from the FDA for the device. The startup would begin to bring in revenue in 2020 if all goes as planned.
Lynx, which in addition to Pak has two part-time employees and counts Young, now an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, as an advisor, has received about $350,000 in grant funding during the four years it has been operating. Most of that came via a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research award from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute to support the prospective clinical trial. Pak says her company is currently seeking between $800,000 and $1 million in seed financing, and is mostly targeting angel investors. After that, her plan is to raise a Series A funding round in late 2018, which would be more likely to involve participation from venture capital groups.
In the long term, the goal is to enter into partnerships with large drug makers that are developing blood cancer drugs, Pak says.
“By using our technology, the pharmaceutical companies can begin to identify patients who are more likely to respond to their drug,” she says. “They can [then] enroll only [those] patients in their clinical trials, which can potentially increase their chances of success and reaching FDA approval.”
