The Mark Foundation’s investment portfolio company (and research grant alumnus) C2i Genomics took advantage of the first in-person AACR Annual Meeting in three years to create a major presence at the conference. C2i Genomics is developing ultra-sensitive liquid biopsy technologies, having spun out of foundational research at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center funded by a 2018 ASPIRE award from The Mark Foundation.
C2i’s booth in the AACR Exhibit Hall promoted their platform, using bold images of man’s first steps on the moon to encourage potential partners and customers to visualize C2i’s enablement of “a new age in cancer surveillance.”
C2i also presented four prominent, well-visited posters that described research conducted with collaborators worldwide: NYU Langone in New York City, Aarhus University in Denmark, and the National Cancer Center of Singapore. These posters demonstrated the power of C2i’s whole genome sequencing-based cancer surveillance technology when applied in pediatric brain cancers, bladder cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer. On retrospective cohorts of patient blood samples, C2i was able to detect very low levels of circulating tumor DNA with high sensitivity, thus tracking minimal residual disease following surgery and/or chemotherapy and monitoring potential recurrences.
We congratulate C2i on these successes as well as their first marketing authorization, a CE Mark in Europe, also announced in April. The Mark Foundation looks forward to our continued involvement in C2i’s path toward tremendous impact on patients through enabling better cancer treatment decisions.