EMV Capital invests in San Francisco-based liquid biopsy company Vortex Biosciences

 EMV Capital announces the acquisition of a controlling stake in Bay Area-based Vortex Biosciences, and a further investment package to accelerate the company’s development.

Robert Englert, CEO of Vortex Biosciences, commented “We will apply this new funding to achieve an expanded menu of downstream integration. Our vision at Vortex is to improve Cancer detection and therapy by providing the best CTC sample workflow from a standard tube of blood. The VTX-1 instrument has demonstrated outstanding performance in the hands of our customers and collaborators, such as the research we support on human and murine model CTC investigations and new research on single cell drug testing methods.”

EMV Capital MD Dr. Ilian Iliev said “As an IP-focused venture investor we understand the value that has been created by the Vortex team. We were impressed with the Vortex team’s vision on the central role they can play in the growing liquid biopsy market which is forecast to reach $8bn by 2023. Our support will help the company accelerate their growth in the North American and European markets, and expand the functionalities of the platform”.

Vortex Biosciences provides an automated, label-free, benchtop solution for isolation and purification of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) from a standard 8ml tube of blood. The VTX-1 instrument rapidly processes the sample through micro vortices to enrich the CTCs and delivers these highly purified cells into a choice of collection formats. These samples are easily integrated into downstream genomics, protein markers testing, single cell analysis and staining techniques. The blood tube can be processed to also preserve the ctDNA content of the sample for downstream NGS analysis.

There is increasing recognition that pathology will move towards greater use of decision-support tools and systems, and Vortex is in a good position to provide a solution to this growing market. The global liquid biopsy market is forecast to grow from $3Bln in 2018 to $8Bln by 2023, with the CTC isolation and enrichment market in particular expected to grow by a CAGR of 18.2% between 2017 and 2023. There are currently more than 500 clinical trials focused on CTCs as identified in clinicaltrials.gov.