KIYATEC Inc., a Greenville-based medical startup with a focus on cancer therapy, recently announced that it had received an investment worth$2.5 million from Seae Ventures, a healthcare service and technology venture capital fund headquartered in Boston. The fund’s work regarding disruptive healthcare technologies corresponds with KIYATEC’s goal to fundamentally change the way cancer drugs are chosen by providing oncologists with patient-specific responses to such drugs, prior to beginning any form of treatment.
Although several major developments have occurred in the field of personalised medicine in the last 20 years, a large majority of professional oncologists are still not able to predict appropriate treatment responses when it comes to individual patients and their specific needs. As a consequence, many patients receive drug therapies that prove to be ineffective or even harmful, as patients often experience toxic side effects and are burdened with high costs of treatment.
However, KIYATEC’s three-dimensional PREDICT platform and several related tests work to increase the patient-centric value of cancer drugs by informing oncologists about the individual requirements of each patient even before the selection of pre-treatment cancer drugs. More importantly, the platform also assists pharmaceutical companies by improving their decision-making capacities across lifecycles of associated drugs.
Following this investment, the managing partner of Seae Ventures, Jason Robart, has become the newest addition to KIYATEC’s board of directors, which is expected to be beneficial to KIYATEC’s vision. The fund’s various professional and personal relationships within the healthcare industry, coupled with Robart’s personal experience innovating creative and benefit methods of health insurance will help KIYATEC execute their strategy and provide help to those who need it most: cancer patients and their treatment providers.
The investment is another news that follows upon KIYATEC’s continued success. The first release of the three-dimensional PREDICT clinical study data in the latter half of last year, along with the more recent publication in March 2021 about expanding their technological platform into immuno-oncology, highlights the speed with which KIYATEC is growing and progressing. The company’s platform has been shown to be clinically predictive in terms of patient-specific response to chemotherapy and other related targeted agents, and it has been proven to be reliable in the treatment of both ovarian cancer and high-grade gliomas.
KIYATEC has the potential to significantly improve the treatment process and outcomes for patients and their providers across a range of cancer types. Furthermore, its Clinical Services business is currently involved in clinical studies regarding breast cancer, ovarian cancer, glioblastoma and rare tumours. Meanwhile, Drug Development Services business has partnered with several prominent biopharmaceutical companies to study investigational drug candidates across the majority of solid tumour types.
