Congratulations, Seer!

By David Singer

We would like to extend a well-deserved congratulations to the team at Seer, who has just announced a new $55 million funding round. More importantly, the team has published the first study demonstrating the technology.

In a paper in Nature Communications, Seer employees and affiliated researchers used the platform to analyze 141 plasma samples from non-small cell lung cancer patients and healthy controls, identifying more than 2,000 proteins and generating a classifier that distinguished between the two sets of subjects with an area under the curve of .91. In addition to the lung cancer profiling work, the Nature Communications study also looked at the linearity and reproducibility of the system’s measurements.

As I learned at Affymetrix, the introduction of novel tools that enable the research community to explore whole new areas in an unbiased and practical manner leads to critical and heretofore unavailable insights into human biology. These insights can’t help but have valuable implications for human health.

Since first investing in the company back in 2018, we’ve seen firsthand the tremendous growth, ambition, and diligent work the Seer team has put in for the overall advancement of the scientific community.

Congratulations again to Omid Farokhzad, Philip Ma, Omead Ostadan and the rest of the brilliant Seer team. We look forward to seeing you all continue to break barriers with world-changing ideas.

The views expressed herein are solely the views of the author(s) and are not necessarily the views of Maverick Capital, Ltd. or any of its affiliates. They are not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, investment advice.