M&G Investments today announces it has invested in Harbinger Health (“Harbinger”), a biotechnology company pioneering new technologies to fundamentally change cancer screening and detection. The US based company has raised $140 million in Series B funding to complete the clinical validation of the firm’s first blood-based cancer screening product and scale-up ahead of its first product launch.
The company’s goal is to lead the way to a future where cancer screening is routine, affordable and accessible to everyone, and is expected to launch its first product – a laboratory developed test (LDT) for the detection of early cancer – in 2025. Harbinger’s product development strategy is designed to enable low-cost population testing to achieve broad affordability, improve Positive Predictive Value (PPV) to reduce the burden of false positives, and quantitative individual longitudinal monitoring to better guide clinical decision making if cancer is detected. Harbinger’s platform, HarbingerHx, leverages machine learning, proprietary insights into the molecular biology of cancer’s origins, and growing datasets to develop insights that maximise clinical informativeness.
M&G was one of a number of investors in the company’s latest financing round. M&G’s investment was made by Catalyst, the firm’s £5 billion purpose-led flexible private assets strategy, which invests in innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest environmental and social challenges, on behalf of the £129 billion Prudential With-Profits Fund, which includes the £53.5 billion PruFund.
Niranjan Sirdeshpande, Head of Catalyst Investment, M&G, comments: “Innovation in medical science is being led by companies such as Harbinger, whose technology has the potential to change how we screen, detect and treat cancer in the future. By providing patient capital over the long-term, we are investing in companies that are scaling-up, to bring transformational products such as this to the market which stand to benefit our societies as a whole.”
Stephen Hahn, M.D., CEO of Harbinger Health, says: “At Harbinger, our goal is to lead the way to a future where cancer screening is routine, affordable and accessible for everyone. We have a unique opportunity to make cancer screening tools work better and work for more people through our biological and technical solutions. We are achieving this by combining machine learning with insights into the biology of cancer’s origins and individual risk in order to provide actionable information to providers, enabling them to guide improved clinical decision making for their patients. This is where I see our greatest potential to reduce cancer mortality rates in our lifetimes.
