Early Is Good diagnostics company secures $4M in seed funding
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An Indianapolis-based diagnostic company focused on renal disease, has closed a $4 million seed round from Social Capital, a Silicon Valley-based technology investment firm, to support early detection of renal system diseases. Early is Good, or EIG, says the funds will allow it to complete clinical trials for its first product, BCDx, an early bladder cancer detection test.
The company specializes in diagnostics testing through the use of biomarkers found in urine that indicate renal system diseases, including bladder, kidney, and prostate cancers.
“EIG hopes to give millions of people access to accurate, convenient, and early diagnoses for renal diseases,” Social Capital partner Jay Zaveri said. “With EIG’s early breakthrough work around bladder cancer, they are developing a single lab-developed test, BCDx, which would enable patients to detect potential bladder cancer earlier and more conveniently than any other test currently available.”
EIG says the BCDx test uses nanotechnology to quantify a patient’s urinary biomarkers to diagnose bladder cancer and the stage of the disease.
“Despite being one of the most common cancers in the U.S., we still rely on old techniques to diagnose bladder cancer,” said EIG’s founder and CEO Dr. Thakshila Liyanage. “Our technology can distinguish healthy versus oncogenic phenotypes earlier and more specifically than a cystoscopy, while also having the benefit of being non-invasive and less reliant on inconvenient procedures and subjective analysis.”
EIG says BCDx differs from other current standards of practice. The non-invasive technology uses a single lab-developed test to evaluate a range of biomarkers, as opposed to other methods that rely mainly on the presence of blood in a patient’s urine to detect renal disease.