Pilot Growth News

In support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Counsyl launches “Get Ahead of Cancer SF” to help identify women at risk of inherited cancers.

Counsyl, a health technology company that offers DNA screening for diseases that can impact women, men, and their children, is offering all women working and living in the San Francisco Bay Area a free inherited cancer genetic screening in October and November.

In collaboration with UCSF, “Get Ahead of Cancer SF” offers women in the area a free-of-charge Counsyl Inherited Cancer Screen, a genetic test that identifies BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations, among others, that are associated with higher risks of inherited breast, ovarian and gynecological cancer.

Google Ventures has invested $1 million in Metabiota Inc., a company that uses epidemiologists and big-data analytics to forecast and track disease outbreaks.

The investment in an add-on to a $30 million round the company raised in March that included investors Data Collective, Capricorn Health & Special Opportunities, Industry Ventures, Pilot Growth and WP Global Partners.

In its 2015 list of the 50 smartest companies, MIT put Counsyl at #5.

Counsyl, whose tests are used by 3.6% of all U.S. couples before trying to conceive, is expanding from prenatal testing to cancer screening.

Disease outbreak prediction startup Metabiota has raised $30 million in Series A funding to help build out its offerings to government organizations and insurers on a global scale.

Growth equity firm Pilot Growth Equity, a previous investor in Metabiota, led this round of funding for what it sees as a continued potential for the startup to become a multi-billion dollar company.

A group of virus hunters in San Francisco may be closer to changing the way insurers, companies and countries deal with the risk of another Ebola outbreak.

Their company, Metabiota Inc., uses a staff of epidemiologists and researchers in 20 countries to provide forecasts and data on outbreaks. Most of its clients are U.S. government agencies, but in the past three years the firm has pushed deeper into the private sector. On Wednesday Metabiota said it raised $30 million in a new funding round in part to expand its client base among insurance companies and governments.

“We don’t have to just throw up our hands when epidemics happen,” said Nathan Wolfe, a virologist who founded Metabiota in 2008. “Through a combination of monitoring and modeling, we can be proactive and hedge some of the risk.”

Women expecting a baby or planning a pregnancy are being pitched a fast-growing array of tests to check if they are carriers for hundreds of mostly rare genetic diseases. Counsyl offers tests that aim to detect heightened genetic risk for at least 98 different diseases, for between $599 and $999.

“We have the technology and it’s affordable enough that we don’t need to put people into ethnic categories,” says Shivani Nazareth, director of women’s health for Counsyl Inc., in South San Francisco, Calif., one of the largest carrier-screening companies. “If we can offer the same panel to everyone, it’s so much more efficient.”

Virologist Nathan Wolfe is on the race to find new diseases and the growing risk of epidemics. The probability that a disease can jump from animals to humans and then become a large-scale epidemic has increased as the world’s population has grown and become more mobile, says Dr. Wolfe.

Picking up viruses from animals is a primary way that new epidemics originate. “We’ve moved further into forests, and we have more contact with some of these animals, and simultaneously, we’ve surrounded ourselves with much more intensive livestock production,” he says.

Part of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – Horizon 2020 Metabiota Inc. announced today that the European Commission (EC) has awarded funding to the Company to work with European and Canadian collaborators on an advanced project aimed …

The Revolutionary Lab Counsyl is Making Genetic Testing Affordable, Fast, and Friendly

The robots handle the saliva with care. They group scores of tiny, rubber-capped test tubes into orderly racks and position them under plunging needles. An articulated arm moves some of them from one automated track to another, and all of them eventually get loaded into a small, box-shaped device whose sole job is to vigorously shake things. This separates patients’ DNA from their spit. Everything that this huddle of roughly 200 robotic components is doing is about extracting valuable genetic signals from raw physiological noise.

A Silicon Valley startup that screens parents-to-be for rare genetic diseases has raised $28 million from Goldman Sachs and Pilot Growth Equity.

That brings total financing for the Bay area startup, Counsyl, to $93 million. Chief Executive Ramji Srinivasan said he will use the new money to develop products, and market tests for consumers and physicians across the United States.