Ann Arbor, MI-based precision medicine startup Strata Oncology announced last week that it has raised a $12 million Series A round. Arboretum Ventures and Baird Capital led the financing, with participation from Michigan eLab, a returning investor.
Strata is on a mission to make tumor sequencing for cancer patients more accessible. As personalized genetic therapies to treat cancer advance and increasingly make their way into the clinic, Strata CEO Dan Rhodes said the challenge is finding the appropriate patients to treat.
“Today, tumor sequencing is generally not reimbursed by insurance carriers, so most U.S. patients don’t do it,” he explained. “They don’t know if they’re eligible for clinical trials of precision medicine. From pharma’s perspective, we need to identify patients to enroll in clinical trials and if it takes too long, it affects the medicine getting to market. This is an opportunity to really accelerate precision medicine.” Read more here…