Redefining Cancer Detection: The Story of Curve Biosciences —
Summary
Curve Biosciences is one of our non-New Zealand investments in the liver cancer diagnostics space with tremendous potential for transforming detection and care of this highly aggressive cancer. The founder Dr. Ritish Patnaik did his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Stanford where he worked on applying data mining and machine learning to bioassays for disease detection. While liquid biopsy is a fast growing market led by companies like GRAIL (acquired by Illumina), Ritish saw that the existing tests suffer from a high false positive rates for high-risk liver cancer population.The blood from the high-risk patients have significantly higher background noise, requiring blood tests with markers that have very few false positive biomarkers. While tests by these companies are able to detect cancer in healthy populations, they struggle with high-risk patients. This panel discovery advantage leads to optimized cancer tests that show higher accuracy for high-risk testing and that can uniquely leverage a powerful, decentralized business model.We were blown away by the technical chops and single minded focus of the Curve team to address liver cancer detection, and are delighted to be an investor in their seed round.