Epic Sciences Raises $42M in First Close of Series F Financing to Advance Comprehensive Profiling for Metastatic Cancer Patients
Epic Sciences, Inc. ("Epic" or "Epic Sciences"), a privately held diagnostics company, has completed a $43 million first close of its Series F financing. The company will use the capital from this additional round of private investment to continue to advance its multi-omic platform and expand operations in areas such as single-cell sequencing and data analytics infrastructure.
Arsenal Capital Partners ("Arsenal"), a leading private equity firm specializing in building transformational healthcare businesses, led the growth investment, which included continued support from existing investors such as Blue Ox Healthcare Partners, Deerfield Management, and Labcorp.
"We are extremely proud to have a world-class group of strategic partners backing us to meet the growing demand for Epic's liquid biopsy offerings," says Lloyd Sanders, President and CEO, Epic Sciences. "We are continuing to innovate testing for both the research and clinical markets. Our biopharma partners are driving our presence into drug development efforts and an increasing number of clinical trials, while we continue to see growing excitement from practicing clinical oncologists for DefineMBC™ and future tests."
DefineMBC™, Epic's novel blood-based test for comprehensively characterizing metastatic breast cancer, has been reporting patient results since April 2022. The test's multi-analyte methods have demonstrated impressive sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision in the:
detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs)
assessment of protein expression (HER2, ER)
determination of intra-cell copy number variations (CNV) within individual CTCs
identification of single nucleotide variants (SNVs), indels, fusions, and CNVs from plasma-based cell-free DNA analysis, the calculation of microsatellite instability (MSI) and tumor mutational burden (TMB)
Concurrent with the financing round, Epic has also appointed two new members to its Board of Directors: James Rothman PhD, the Chair of Arsenal's Healthcare Advisory Board, a renowned cell biologist and Nobel Laureate, who was formerly Chief Scientist of GE Healthcare, as well as Richard Eglen PhD, a Senior Advisor of Arsenal, who brings decades of industry leadership experience with companies such as PerkinElmer, Roche Bioscience, and Corning Inc.
"What is most exciting about Epic's approach is the ability to derive valuable insights from data at the cellular and subcellular level for both drug developers and clinicians in oncology," says Dr. Rothman, who also serves as the Sterling Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine.