Healthcare companies like Grail and Guardant are worth billions as leaders in the field of “liquid biopsies,” which enable the detection of cancers with just a blood draw. But many of these companies face a particular challenge: Once the cancer is detected, it’s not always clear where in the body the tumor is actually located.
Earli, a South San Francisco-based biotech company, has a plan to fix this problem: instead of searching through the body for a tumor or cancer cells, it plans to make cancer cells reveal themselves. If the tumor is a needle in a haystack, Earli’s plan is to make the needle glow bigger and brighter—literally. And it’s close to reaching this goal.
“No one else is taking the approach that Earli is taking,” says Justin Kao, a partner at Khosla Ventures. Kao says that many liquid biopsy companies are stuck after a blood test detects cancer, because then a patient knows they have cancer, but not where it is. In those cases, Kao says, “You’ve actually created a worse problem.
Earli’s technology works by injecting a drug that moves through the body looking for cancer cells. If it detects these cells, it forces them to create an enzyme that, when imaged with a PET scan, causes the cancerous tissue to glow. Even if the tumor is too small to be seen on normal medical images, says Earli CEO Cyriac Roeding, “we help localize it, make it visible.”
The idea behind Earli came from the lab of the late Sanjiv “Sam” Gambhir, the former chair of radiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. Gambhir lost his own battle with cancer in July 2020. He was “a brilliant scientist and an even better human being,” says Roeding, who cofounded the company with Gambhir and chief scientific officer David Suhy in 2018.
I hope the tumors don’t spend it all in one place