San Diego, CA – On October 11th, 2022, EvoNexus, California’s leading non-profit tech incubator, selected MeCo Diagnostics to join its exclusive portfolio of innovative seed-stage medtech companies.
“The San Diego region has a history of spawning technology companies that changed healthcare on a world-wide level. Dexcom, Illumina, Human Longevity, NuVasive and ResMed are a few of the many San Diego based successes. MeCo Diagnostics has the potential to perform risk/intervention analysis of early-stage breast cancer patients for the likelihood of cancer metastasis to other areas of the body,” said Rory Moore, CEO & Co-Founder of EvoNexus. “Bones are the most common destination of migration for breast cancer and MeCo Diagnostics intends to mitigate this deadly metastasis. Hundreds of thousands of women are diagnosed with this cancer in the US alone every year resulting in over 50,000 deaths annually. EvoNexus is immensely proud to assist MeCo Diagnostics with their important mission.”
MeCo Diagnostics traces its origins to the oldest observation in cancer biology: tumors often grow stiffer than surrounding tissue, leading to a palpable lump that is a leading indicator of disease. Last year, MeCo Diagnostics published research revealing the existence of a subpopulation of cancer cells that are highly responsive to increased tumor stiffness, leading them to become “mechanically conditioned,” akin to deadly, microscopic wind-up machines that wreak havoc as they spread throughout the body.
Mechanical conditioning as a problem dictates mechanical deconditioning as a solution; intriguingly, there are FDA-approved antifibrotic drugs that MeCo Diagnostics has characterized which possess secondary, on-target functionality as mechanical deconditioning agents. This phenomenon has allowed MeCo Diagnostics to develop a biomarker-driven drug repurposing approach that aims to synergize with conventional neoadjuvant treatments to reduce breast cancer burden in patients before surgery.
Currently, MeCo Diagnostics is clinically validating their foundational biomarker technology, the MeCo Score, to identify patients with early-stage breast cancer who may benefit from their emerging treatment strategy called Mechanical Deconditioning Therapy (MDT). MeCo Diagnostics recently partnered with a cancer research hospital to conduct a retrospective analysis of a Phase II clinical trial assessing MDT, using MeCo Score for patient stratification, with initial results expected by Q1 2023.
“MDT is a novel application of targeted antifibrotic therapy tailored to a subset of high-risk breast cancer patients whom we can identify using leftover biopsy tissue to calculate MeCo Scores. Our mission is to predict and prevent cancer metastasis by leveraging low-toxicity, repurposed drugs for MDT, without displacing standard-of-care treatments,” says Dr. Adam Watson, Co-Founder of MeCo Diagnostics.
“By partnering with an established clinical genomics services provider, MeCo Diagnostics will be able to multiplex our next-generation sequencing (NGS) based laboratory developed test (LDT) into an existing clinical genomics analysis pipeline. Consolidation of actionable genomic and transcriptomic data will lower the overall cost of cancer care, reduce the amount of time and tissue needed for comprehensive analysis, and ultimately improve outcomes for patients.”
Moving forward, MeCo Diagnostics aims to broaden their total addressable market by bifurcating their R&D activity to include early-stage prostate cancer, which shares crucial underlying mechanistic features with breast cancer that are quantified by the proprietary MeCo Score multivariate algorithm.
About EvoNexus
EvoNexus is a San Diego-based deep tech non-profit incubator with a portfolio of 257 technology startups with over 40 exits through acquisition that have attracted over $3.8B in funding and outcomes. EvoNexus enables entrepreneurs to turn their transformative ideas into fundable, commercially viable companies. Over 400 venture capital funds have invested into Evonexus portfolio companies. For more information, please visit evonexus.org.
