NEW YORK – Adela, a Toronto-based startup looking to develop a liquid biopsy test based on detecting DNA methylation, said on Wednesday that it has raised $60 million in Series A financing.
F-Prime Capital led the round, joined by OrbiMed, Deerfield Management, Decheng Capital, and RA Capital Management.
"The immense potential of our core technology has been demonstrated across 10 different cancer types," Scott Bratman, Adela's cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. "As opposed to competing approaches reliant upon chemical or enzymatic treatment and narrower targeted measurement of methylated DNA, we profile all methylated DNA fragments in a vial of blood in an unbiased manner. This enables us to achieve robust cancer detection, as well as tissue-of-origin classification, from a single blood sample."
Adela said it will use the funding to advance its technology for commercialization, targeting initial applications across cancer from early detection to disease monitoring.
The firm, formerly known as DNAMx, has licensed technology developed by cofounder and CSO Daniel De Carvalho, a researcher at University Health Network's Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, in collaboration with researchers at Sinai Health System. Cell-free methylated DNA immunoprecipitation and high-throughput sequencing, or cfMeDIP-seq, does not use bisulfite conversion to analyze methylation by sequencing. While effective, bisulfite library preparation can damage DNA.
Adela added that it plans to apply the technology to other, unspecified diseases.