NEW YORK & REDWOOD CITY, Calif.– Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in Earli Inc., a biotechnology company that developed a novel approach to early cancer detection with a synthetic targeting platform that selectively reprograms cancer cells to reveal and destroy themselves. This investment from Accenture Ventures will support expanding collaborations with global health and pharma companies that can use Earli’s technology to more rapidly and accurately detect and treat cancer.
Based in Redwood City, California, Earli’s mission is to transform cancer into a benign experience by solving one of the most difficult challenges in oncology: reliably distinguishing between healthy and cancerous cells. Earli’s approach uses programmable genetic constructs that react and signal the presence of active cancer cells at an early stage. The synthetic biopsy approach enhances the sensitivity and specificity of cancer detection for an earlier diagnosis, allowing pharmaceutical and biotech companies to create personalized treatments more quickly and often at a lower cost.
Petra Jantzer, Ph.D., a senior managing director and global lead of the Accenture Life Sciences business, said, “Earli’s synthetic biopsy method is a step change in early cancer detection technologies and will offer significant advantages to biopharma companies by improving the precision and efficacy of new treatments and diagnostics, as well as in understanding the mechanisms of cancer progressions.”
Early detection and treatment are proving critical in dramatically increasing chances for successful treatment of cancer and remission. Earli’s technology has the potential to discover the presence and location of multiple types of cancer through non-invasive screening techniques including blood samples and PET (positron emission tomography) scans, even tumors that are too small to be detected through existing methods.
“Accenture’s impressive network of biopharma clients will be very impactful for Earli. It is fantastic to have Accenture support our mission to make cancer a benign experience,” said Cyriac Roeding, Co-Founder & CEO, Earli Inc.
“Earli’s technology is built on decades of biological data that analyzes multiple factors and identifies specific proteins that cause cancer development, increasing the effectiveness and reliability of the synthetic biopsy process,” said Tom Lounibos, global lead for Accenture Ventures. “With Earli joining our Project Spotlight program, we can collaborate with our clients in the biopharma industry to advance their capabilities in cancer research, drug development and patient care.”
Earli is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. Project Spotlight offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology. Additional biotechnology companies that have joined Project Spotlight include Turbine, QuantHealth, Virtonomy and Ocean Genomics.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
