A Northumberland start-up that aims to accelerate diagnosis and treatments of rare cancers hopes to raise between £2m-£3m this year.
Rarecan, which was recently named among this year's top UK SMEs, allows patients to share data about rare cancers with researchers and companies developing drugs with a view to speeding up the potential treatments and giving them access to clinical trials. The Hexham-based health tech firm raised £460,000 in seed funding last year and this year hopes to land a lead investor that can take it through its next funding round.
Most of the company's existing backers are angel investors impressed by Rarecan's plan to generate future revenues from biotech customers - including pharmaceutical firms - who want to access high quality data in order to develop treatments, products and services. It is hoped that Rarecan will help the drug development pipeline through identifying, screening and recruiting patients.
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Speaking to BusinessLive, the firm's CEO Piers Kotting said Rarecan is on a several-year trajectory to fully realise its potential during which time it could help facilitate increasingly targeted therapeutic approaches to rare cancers which are being discovered all the time and therefore account for more and more of the cancer population.
Mr Kotting explained: "Our vision has grown from a particular set of cancers and a particular problem to acknowledging the industry needs a new platform that brings together very highly defined and characterised patients at a very specific point of time in their treatment pathway - typically a new therapeutic is targeted either through a new first line treatment or more commonly as a new second line treatment.
"Rarecan is now very much buoyed by conversations we have with big pharma companies and with biotech accelerator programmes and organisations like Cancer Research UK, who now sponsor us. We're looking at development of a global platform that enables researchers to target very specific patients."
Given time, Rarecan, which is already generating some revenues, hopes to licence the platform to big drug development companies. Having talked to potential customers, initially the firm will target its platform outside in Europe and one Asian country from its Hexham base, which is centred around a cluster of North East-based home working staff.
Mr Kotting said: "It's a massively plural market - there are lots of different companies and start-ups at different stages. In the broadest sense of the market, it's about enabling the development of diagnostics and drugs. Lots of what we can talk about translates into the clinical space, i.e. testing in patients, but it's not just about that because we also provide tissue samples for pre-clinical work - for people to do discovery and translation work before they would then take them into human trials."
There are other "platforms" in the big and rapidly growing cancer market that offer patients connection to trials, but most have typically less data than Rarecan, which Mr Kotting says can more significantly tailor the search for patients based on industry needs and do so at the right time. There are also community tools that aim to bring patients together. In contrast there are firms that offer to "mine" huge data sets within electronic patient records - such as US cancer data company Flatiron which was acquired in 2019 for $1.9bn.
Mr Kotting said: "One of the problems with the big data approach is those data are incredibly dirty and inaccurate, and they don't typically come with patient consent. Therefore it's quite difficult to do things with those data. In analysis terms they're fine, but they're de-identified."
He added: "We see ourselves as being quite different in that we bring a number of things together: being purely rare cancer-focussed and having deep data capabilities, so we can really focus on working out what someone's actual diagnosis is and what are the features of their tumour etc. We then bring that together with some patient-facing technology that are useful to our members so they can stay with us long term and we can know a lot about them."
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