An­ces­tryD­NA chief takes on liq­uid biop­sy chal­lenge; Thomas Lynch chairs for­mer col­league's can­cer start­up

Ken­neth Chahine is the man be­hind An­ces­tryD­NA, the di­rect-to-con­sumer ge­net­ic ge­neal­o­gy prod­uct with more than 15 mil­lion users. The com­pa­ny re­cent­ly launched An­ces­try Health, which in part us­es next-gen­er­a­tion se­quenc­ing (NGS), but is priced un­der $100. These were some of Chahine’s goals at An­ces­try — hav­ing met them, he be­gan the search for his next gig. Hav­ing tast­ed the wide­spread im­pact of di­rect-to-con­sumer test­ing, the field of liq­uid biop­sy and ear­ly can­cer de­tec­tion was ap­peal­ing.

“Look, hon­est­ly…when I first looked at LAM (Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Ad­vanced Med­i­cine) I wasn’t that en­thu­si­as­tic just be­cause the com­pa­ny is re­al­ly build­ing a foun­da­tion and it wasn’t re­al­ly clear to me, they weren’t in the me­dia,” he said in an in­ter­view with End­points News. 

But af­ter talk­ing to the founder, Shu Li (who will va­cate the CEO spot to make room for Chahine but stick around as chair­man), and dig­ging in­to the da­ta, he was suit­ably im­pressed. “I came to the con­clu­sion that this is a di­a­mond in the rough. This is the one that every­one’s ig­nor­ing. Be­cause it hasn’t been high pro­file, it doesn’t have high pro­file VCs, be­cause it’s been fund­ed by phil­an­thropy slash fam­i­ly of­fices…”

The field of liq­uid biop­sy is crowd­ed in­clud­ing high-pro­file names such as Grail, Guardant Health, Freenome, and the re­cent­ly launched Thrive, with great ex­pec­ta­tions that a less-in­va­sive method for ear­ly can­cer de­tec­tion will save lives and mon­ey.

LAM has long cham­pi­oned the use of methy­la­tion tech­nol­o­gy for can­cer de­tec­tion. “So frankly, LAM beat every­one to the punch, and whether that was through bril­liance or just luck the re­al­i­ty is that they’ve been do­ing methy­la­tion now for about 10 years and have patents and ar­ti­cles go­ing back to 2014,” Chahine said.

Us­ing its tech­nol­o­gy, LAM has col­lect­ed da­ta on over 100,000 pa­tients. In con­trast, Grail, re­cent­ly re­port­ed da­ta from a 2,500 pa­tient study that used its methy­la­tion tech, he added. “So their (LAM’s) in­sights in­to what mark­ers ac­tu­al­ly pre­dict can­cer is just way bet­ter than any­one else in my opin­ion.”

— Na­tal­ie Grover 

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