University of Arizona Spinout Precision Epigenomics Brings a 70-Cancer Blood Test From Lab to Market

By Kyle Macdonald, COO of Silicon Oasis

One of Arizona's most promising diagnostics companies started in a University of Arizona lab. Precision Epigenomics, a U of A spinout, has built EPISEEK, a blood test that looks for DNA methylation changes linked to more than 70 types of cancer, according to a Nov. 7 Arizona Daily Star profile.

Co-founder, president and CEO Dr. Mark Nelson, a University of Arizona professor, developed the technology with Dr. Bernard Futscher and turned to Tech Launch Arizona to test whether it could work outside the lab. The company spent two years in the UA Center for Innovation, soft-launched in 2022 and launched officially in 2024. It now has 22 employees.

The company says EPISEEK returns results in about a week, compared with two to three weeks for competing tests. It also says the test has nearly twice the sensitivity for early-stage cancers and costs far less than competitors.

That matters because Arizona's universities produce research that rarely turns into companies at scale. Precision Epigenomics followed the full path: a faculty discovery, commercialization support from Tech Launch Arizona, incubation at the Center for Innovation and a commercial product in a competitive national market. Nelson expects multicancer screening to become standard care within four to five years.

Silicon Oasis is working to establish Arizona as a Top 5 technology ecosystem, and university spinouts like this one are a big part of how that happens. That is the larger Silicon Oasis story.

Article of Reference: https://tucson.com/news/local/column/article_5fe3780e-8d3d-4055-8fd8-6fe44b6d410c.html