Redefining Cancer Detection: The Story of Curve Biosciences
We hope you are all gearing up to attend the NZVC Inaugural Portfolio Day to be held on October 27th in Wellington right before the EHF welcome event. Please see the details below and let us know if you need any help with the logistics. We are really looking forward to seeing you all in person and introducing you to our amazing founders and fellow limited partners.
Event: NZVC Inaugural Portfolio Day
We will be hosting our portfolio companies + major LPs at a day-long event in Wellington. The purpose of the event is for founders to meet each other and our investors and share knowledge and expertise across different domains. We will have several of our major LPs giving fireside chats including Tom Staggs (Disney COO) and Jaan Tallinn (founder of Skype). We will also also several panel discussions with founders of different industries (deep tech, b2b Saas, marketplaces).
Startup of the month: Curve Biosciences
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. This is a big issue for clinical trial-based approaches employed by GRAIL and others, where significant data imbalance issues lead to many biomarkers that are false positive for high-risk testing. While tests by these companies are able to detect cancer in healthy populations, they struggle with high-risk patients. Curve’s data mining platform produces balanced data that have allowed them to build blood tests with small, novel panels of biomarkers with very few false positives. 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. There is potential to bring their technology to New Zealand and address the need for liver cancer detection in Maori populations who have a disproportionately high incidence rate of this cancer.
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson