C2i Genomics, the spinout company to commercialize a super-sensitive cancer blood test developed by scientists at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and Weill Cornell Medicine, has been named a finalist for The Spinoff Prize 2021. The announcement of this news and a profile of C2i Genomics was published in Nature today.
The Spinoff Prize is an annual prize established last year by Nature Research Awards, part of the academic publisher, Springer, and Merck KGaA, a leading science and technology company, to showcase and celebrate global excellence in the commercialization of research through the creation of companies specifically designed to leverage the outputs generated from research conducted at a university or research institute.
As a finalist, C2i Genomics is among the “final eight” out of a pool of 100 candidates now advancing to present their technology and their business plans to a panel of expert judges at an online slam event in an effort to win The Spinoff Prize’s €30,000 cash award. Judges announced the winner as part of the Future Insight Virtual Event, to be held on July 12, 2021.
New York Genome Center Core Faculty Member Dan Landau, MD, PhD
C2i Genomics’s commercialization focus is on advancing the highly sensitive “liquid biopsy” blood test and whole genome cancer detection platform first developed in the lab of NYGC Core Faculty Member Dan Landau, MD, PhD, who holds a joint appointment as an Associate Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. The lab team’s study of their method was published in June 2020 in Nature Medicine, demonstrating its potential value with blood tests on patients who had melanomas, colorectal cancers, and lung cancers. The results showed that the new technique can be used to detect blood-borne tumor DNA even when it is much too sparse to be detected by existing methods.
Dr. Landau co-founded C2i Genomics with co-first author Dr. Asaf Zviran, a member of his laboratory during the study, and others. The company was launched as a commercial venture between NYGC and Weill Cornell Medicine in August 2019. Since then, C2i Genomics has raised $12M and $100M in Series A and B financing, respectively, to fund the development and clinical validation of its personalized, real-time solution for monitoring recurrence and treatment response for various types of solid cancers. In February, Dr. Landau was awarded a 2021 Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement Award from the Clinical Research Forum in recognition of the study describing this technology as highly innovative and clinically translatable research with the potential to provide major benefits to patients. C2i Genomics was also featured in 10 Startups to Watch by Clinical Omics earlier this month.
Dr. Dan Landau is a cofounder with equity, scientific advisory board member, and speaker for C2i Genomics.
