Cancer therapeutics

With many cancers not untreatable as such, but simply discovered too late, one of the biggest ways to lower cancer deaths is early detection.

To support this work, startups are developing new technologies from liquid biopsies that use blood tests to detect cancer early to applying AI for better medical imaging.

For investors wary of deeptech, startups are developing apps that focus on how patients’ lives are affected by cancer treatment.

As a companion to treatment, these companies will likely generate revenue more quickly than their counterparts working on therapeutics.

Cell therapies take a patient’s immune T-cells and engineer them to attack their tumour.

Since the first cell therapy was approved for blood cancer in 2018, companies have been working on expanding use cases and slashing costs by manufacturing off-the-shelf therapies rather than individually using each patient’s cells.

Thanks to advances in genomic sequencing, scientists are able to design vaccines with much more specific targets. In the realm of cancer, most of these are meant to treat, rather than prevent the disease.

What sets this approach apart from other immunotherapies is the ability of a vaccine to teach cells to detect and destroy the cancer. So far, however, vaccines have mostly only been effective at eliminating small tumours.