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Curtailing a ‘diagnostic
odyssey’
June 2014
EDIT CONNECT
SHARING OPTIONS:
SEATTLE—Molecular diagnostic company Indi (Integrated Diagnostics) recently secured
$30.25 million from the closing of a Series B financing round and an additional $17 million in non-dilutive debt financing provide by Life Sciences
Alternative Funding.
Baird Capital led the
financing round, with existing investors InterWest Partners and the Wellcome Trust also participating. Alexandria Venture Investments, the strategic venture arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc., has also joined the Series B as an investor. In conjunction with
this financing, Dr. Michael Liang, a partner with Baird Capital’s venture capital group, has joined Indi’s board of directors.
Indi plans to use the funds to further commercialize Xpresys Lung, its molecular diagnostic blood test that aids physicians
in dealing with indeterminate lung nodules. The test launched late last year.
“We are very pleased to help
Indi take their early commercial success with Xpresys Lung to the next level,” said Liang. “Indi has taken their innovative proteomic technology
and applied it to a massive unmet need: the high costs associated with over-diagnosing lung nodules. Their strategy is a perfect fit for Baird
Capital’s focus on investing in companies who produce innovative technologies that address expanding market needs.”
Dr. Albert A. Luderer, CEO of Indi, says that some three million nodules are discovered every year in the United States, and
of those, there is a subset of about 600,000 patients per year that he calls “the real problem.”
“The easiest way to characterize those patients is that they fall in a size nodule range of about 8 mm to up to 30 mm,” Luderer explains.
“If you have a nodule of that dimension, we’ve estimated through our clinical trials that the prevalence of cancer is about 23 percent in that
group. Many of those patients are benign. So the real question is, who is benign? Who can you rule out? As we did more and more research on this, we found
that those 600,000 patients consume on average about $35,000 each in terms of diagnostic workup. Because the lung is so difficult to get at and to try to
biopsy, you go through a graded series of more and more invasive procedures. And so patients … go through an honest-to-goodness diagnostic
odyssey.”
Indi’s approach in developing Xpresys Lung—work that began four years ago, says
Luderer—was based on systems biology, as they looked to see if certain proteins in a patient’s plasma “could reflect a state of
pathology.” Xpresys Lung measures the relative abundance of proteins from several pathways associated with lung cancer, through the use of multiple
reaction monitoring mass spectroscopy.
“Our premise was that if you could look broadly across the expression
of the more or the less abundant proteins, that you might be able to see a disturbance in networks as expressed by differential protein expression,”
Luderer tells DDNews. “And that’s exactly what we found in patients with lung nodules; we found a very good cancer signal that switches
on very early that allows us to discriminate a benign from a malignant nodule. And the work we did was all stage 1 cancer; we know how aggressive lung
cancers are, but they’re potentially curable at that stage, so we think we’ll get some benefit there—not only in terms of finding people
who don’t have disease, but those who do have disease, they’re going to be found earlier, I believe.”
“Many people are trying to address the lung cancer question. I think we’re the only ones that have approached it from a ‘rule out
cancer’ and a lung-nodule management point of view,” he adds.
Luderer identifies this as a
multibillion-dollar marketplace in the United States, one of the “rare blockbusters in diagnostic medicine,” and more growth is expected. Luderer
points out that in looking at most cancers, nearly all of the molecular diagnostics are focused in what could be called the late stage of diagnosis: when a
patient has proven disease and the diagnostic is concerned with determining disease aggressiveness and a patient’s potential response to various
therapeutics. As such, he says there is a larger market opportunity earlier in the process.
Pulmonology is not the
only area Indi is interested in, according to Luderer, as the company is also looking into developing diagnostics for certain neurological conditions. Areas
related to traumatic stress disorders, multiple sclerosis and aging disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease are all fields the company is
investigating.
Code: E061422 Back |
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