New Funding, Same Mission to Scale Access to Early Cancer Detection and Prevention

Losing someone you love to cancer is among the worst pain imaginable. I know firsthand — dealing with a late stage diagnosis is an uphill battle that very few people seem to win.?

This is a heartache far too many people still have to experience. Despite hard-won progress in cancer therapies and precision treatments, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. die of cancer each year. Too often, late stage diagnoses are to blame. For example, when colorectal cancer is diagnosed in its earliest stages, the five-year survival rate is 91%. Those odds drop to just 14% when a patient is diagnosed with late stage disease.

The burden of late stage diagnoses is also one that is not equally shared. Colorectal cancer risk is significantly higher among African Americans, who are more likely to be diagnosed at younger ages and in later stages. Black men face the worst odds: They are 24% more likely to develop colorectal cancer than white men and 47% more likely to die from it. Stark inequalities like this can reflect racial disparities in access to screening, but they’re also linked to differences in family history, genetics and other health factors — signaling a need for better access to cancer risk assessment, genetic counseling and individualized prevention plans based on the latest clinical guidelines. ?

These issues are compounded now that hospitals are staring down a backlog of 9.5 million cancer screenings missed during the pandemic. The highest risk patients can’t afford to wait. To end cancer as we know it, healthcare providers need an easy way to distinguish the patients who should be first in line for a colonoscopy from those who may benefit from innovations like at-home colon cancer screening. Because the people who survive cancer are usually the ones who were diagnosed early and who had access to the right resources for their level of risk.

That’s exactly why I founded CancerIQ. My core belief is that we can drastically change what it means to have cancer if we make cancer risk assessment more accessible and ensure all patients have access to personalized, risk-based care pathways. CancerIQ is driven by the vision to end cancer as we know it. And it is our mission to accomplish this by connecting broader patient populations and providers to the latest innovations in early detection and prevention. ?

Over the years, this mission has provoked doubt. Healthcare is stubborn in the belief that cancer startups dedicated to treatment are more commercially viable than cancer startups rooted in early detection and prevention. But as the daughter of cancer genetics expert and medical oncologist Dr. Olufunmilayo “Funmi” Olopade, I am more stubborn in my conviction that the real value is in preventive oncology. My mom, who serves as our Chief Scientific Advisor, worked diligently for years to uncover the cause of disparities in cancer outcomes between Black women and others. Rather than focus solely on access and social determinants of health, she looked at genetic predisposition and failures in early detection. In the same place she found her answers, I found mine.

Now that conviction is starting to pay off. At CancerIQ, we’re turning precision medicine on its head by applying the principles to prevention and early detection. Our cancer-focused precision health platform is being used by clinicians in more than 180 locations across the country to stratify risk and help patients get ahead of cancer. In our Series A funding round, we brought in HealthX Ventures to take our platform to the next level. With that investment, we embedded CancerIQ’s intelligent risk stratification engine directly into the EHR, putting lifesaving clinical decision support tools into the hands of clinicians in primary and specialty care settings alike.?

But this is just the beginning for CancerIQ. Today I’m excited to announce that we have raised $14 million in Series B funding, co-led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (Merck GHI) and Amgen Ventures, as well as McKesson Ventures and OSF Ventures (the investment arm of OSF Healthcare, a current CancerIQ customer). These investors represent major players from every corner of the healthcare system that recognize it’s time to take a different approach if we want to end cancer as we know it. ?

This Series B funding will further propel our mission to build a cancer prevention ecosystem. It will help us reach more health systems, so they can deliver better outcomes to more patients and derive more value from prevention. It will power deeper partnerships with life sciences companies, so we can accelerate and scale the adoption of lifesaving clinical innovations to broader, more diverse patient populations. And it will benefit the scientific community at large, by connecting all the key players in oncology in one place to support clinical trial recruitment and the collection of real-world evidence for earlier stage cancer interventions.

At CancerIQ, we envision a future where cancer is not a death sentence. There are 17 million cancer survivors living in the United States. We want to see that population grow dramatically and change what the cancer experience looks like along the way. If you are driven by this vision — and as fiercely determined and stubbornly committed as we are — then we invite you to join us. Let’s end cancer as we know it through early detection and prevention. Check out our open positions here.