The round was led by 8VC and Basis Set Ventures, with participation from Define Ventures and Even One Ventures. Our team has worked with the lead investors at each of these firms for more than a decade. We’re thrilled to partner with them.
Our thesis is simple: if cancer patients know as much as possible about their unique tumor biology, they and their physicians can make the best treatment decisions.
Each year, new targeted therapies come to market exploiting specific biological features of cancer cells. Often, these features are present across a small fraction of many cancer types, rather than being specific to one type. Given this – many targetable features, each rare but collectively common - the right strategy is to measure everything.
The Valius workup does exactly this. For every patient, we look at expression levels of therapeutic targets across all cancers. Frequently, we’ll find highly expressed markers that would never have been identified by standard gene panels or cancer-specific pathology stains. We do this for every longitudinal sample the patient has, to assess changes and emergent resistance mechanisms. We designed our process to be extraordinarily comprehensive.
Most importantly, we empower patients with information and intelligence.
With traditional diagnostics, patients and physicians have little ability to explore the underlying data, evaluate new findings, or assess expression levels of uncommon targets.
This approach may have made sense in the past, but it doesn’t anymore. In a world of continuously improving AI, the right approach is to give patients all their data, and make it as easy as possible to analyze.
In addition, we’re building the next generation of diagnostics. As new therapeutics increase in power and complexity, so too will our testing methods. Valius is spearheading this next wave of “single cell” diagnostics – those that measure each cell individually.
These new methods will enable assessment of tumor heterogeneity (potentially informing the most effective combination therapies) and illuminate interactions between the tumor and the immune microenvironment. We think this is the future, and we’re leading the charge.
Dealing with a challenging cancer diagnosis is scary. Armed with insights from Valius, patients and oncologists facing such situations can think creatively, specifically, and from biological first principles about the best treatments for their unique cancer.
Our goal is to raise the ceiling on cancer care – to make more patients “positive outliers.”
This is the future we’re determined to see to fruition. Onwards.
