This Company Raised $40 Million To Make Tumors Reveal Themselves

Healthcare companies like Grail and Guardant are worth billions as leaders in the field of “liquid biopsies,” which enable cancers to be detected 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. The company just closed a $40 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Perceptive Advisors, Casdin Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sands Capital and others. This brings the company’s total funding to almost $60 million. 

“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.” Sometimes companies are able to tell what kind of tissue the cancer is located in using machine learning algorithms, but they often can’t pinpoint the precise location of a tumor. That’s where Earli is different. 

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. Gambhir, who’d previously lost his 16 year-old son to cancer in 2015, believed vehemently that the earlier a cancer was detected, the more likely a patient could survive. “He was always looking for the thing that could catch cancer early and make it actionable,” says Roeding. 

In addition to $40 million in new capital, Earli also announced more additions to its scientific advisory board that include well-known figures in cancer and medicine. These include Jim Allison and Pam Sharma of MD Anderson Cancer Center, and MIT professor and billionaire entrepreneur Bob Langer. Also on the board is Leland Hartwell, former director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and 2001 Nobel Prize winner. 

“Nobody else is doing this,” says Hartwell, echoing Kao’s comments about Earli’s approach to locating tumors, “and it has tremendous potential.” 

Earli has proven its technology in mice and in dogs, and will use the new capital to expand its team and begin its first human clinical trials. Roeding says the phase 1 human trials could start as soon as this month. The company plans to first focus on localizing lung cancer tumors, which can often be confused with small, benign nodules. Says Roeding, “we could be getting the go-ahead any day now.”