When it comes to healthcare in the U.S., inequality is prevalent. Studies have shown that people of color are less likely to have health insurance and because of that are less likely to seek medical attention often resulting in a late diagnosis. In Chicago, two Black female founders are trying to change that with their healthtech startup Cancer IQ, which helps detect cancer.
On Thursday, CancerIQ announced that it raised $14 million in a Series B round co-led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Amgen Ventures with participation from HealthX Ventures.
Founded in 2013 by co-founders Feyi Olopade Ayodele and Dr. Olufunmilayo Olopade, the Chicago-based startup serves as a platform for medical staff to assess a patient’s risk for developing cancer. This is determined by using data from family history, genetics and behavior. The platform is used at over 180 medical locations and provides treatment recommendations ranging from labs tests to lifestyle interventions and prophylactic surgeries.
The platform can be extremely useful for communities with barriers to accessing healthcare, according to CancerIQ. A study by the American Cancer Society concluded that only 57 percent of breast cancer is detected in Black women at an early stage compared to 67 percent in white women. This is in turn leads to lower survival rates for Black women. With the CancerIQ platform, medical professionals can take preventative approaches to treat cancers if an individual is at risk for the disease.
“CancerIQ’s vision is to end cancer as we know it by eliminating health disparities and democratizing access to the latest advances in cancer early detection and prevention,” CancerIQ’s co-founder and CEO Feyi Olopade Ayodele said in a statement. “We started by making genetic testing more accessible and connecting patients to the right preventive services at the right time. This latest round of funding will help CancerIQ reach more patients and connect to more innovations that promise to transform cancer from a deadly disease to a manageable condition.”
Prior to the Series B funding round, CancerIQ secured a $4.8 million Series A in August of 2020, according to Crunchbase.
With the new funding, the company is looking to expand its platform and also expand the number of medical networks that use it.
Recently, CancerIQ brought on new senior executives for the roles of chief technology officer, senior vice president of commercial strategy and vice president of health system sales, but the hiring doesn’t stop there. With the new funding, CancerIQ is also planning to hire 50 new team members. It is currently hiring for several positions.
“CancerIQ’s platform creates the critical infrastructure needed to bring cancer-focused precision health into the actual clinical workflow for every clinician at every health system,” Taha Jangda, partner at HealthX Ventures, said in a statement. “This enables clinicians across service lines to perform cancer risk stratification much sooner in the care journey and to steer patients down a precision pathway to prevention and early detection. This is needed now more than ever given the backlog of cancer screenings from the pandemic.”
