In 2015, Jo’s mom was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Even though she was a retired doctor herself and surrounded by other medical professionals, she was 3 years late for her screening. There was no system in place to remind her and no simpler ways to get the testing done.

By coincidence, Jo had just learned about a new scientific theory that had the potential to detect all cancers at an early stage with a simple blood draw. Driven by his mom’s story, Jo decided to take action – and Quantgene was born.

Its original mission at a small lab at UC Berkeley was to develop a novel breakthrough technology called “Liquid Biopsy”. The system uses single-molecule precision sequencing to discover cancer-associated mutations in cell-free DNA that is circulating in the blood.

Over the next 5 years, Quantgene assembled one of the best teams in genomics R&D, developed a world-leading precision sequencing technology and conducted a 5,000 patient trial to investigate the viability of liquid biopsy multi-cancer early detection (MCED). In 2021, the team published two peer-reviewed papers that demonstrated the unprecedented accuracy and detection power of Quantgene DeepGen liquid biopsy.

The vision of MCED and its potential power to End Cancer as we know it created

At the same time, a set of innovative peers to Quantgene engaged on similar journeys, including GRAIL, Thrive and Freenome. Around 2020, it became clear to all of us that MCED was facing two major headwinds: first, there is no feasible pathway to achieve CMS reimbursement in less than a decade; and second, the challenges of population wide MCED