Thrive launches to develop liquid biopsies

Abstract

A start-up called Thrive Earlier Detection has launched with $110 million in series A financing to develop and commercialize liquid biopsies—or blood tests—that can spot the earliest signs of cancer in otherwise healthy people. The company is based on the work of Bert Vogelstein and his Johns Hopkins School of Medicine colleagues Kenneth Kinzler and Nickolas Papadopoulos. Last year, they published a study showing that a liquid biopsy they developed, dubbed CancerSEEK, could identify multiple types of cancer in people by analyzing fragments of just 16 genes and 8 proteins commonly mutated in cancer (Science 2018, DOI: 10.1126/science.aar3247). “The fraction of mutant DNA molecules is very tiny compared to normal DNA in blood,” Vogelstein says. His group created a test with over 99% specificity, meaning that a little less than 1 in 100 people would be wrongly told they had cancer. That makes CancerSEEK one of the best-performing experimental liquid