Mercy BioAnalytics Secures $59 Million Series B to Advance Early Cancer Detection Platform
Mercy BioAnalytics, Inc. has secured $59 million in Series B funding, bolstering its efforts to commercialize early cancer detection diagnostics. The financing round was co-led by Novalis LifeSciences and Sozo Ventures, with additional backing from Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Fund (a venture capital initiative by Perceptive Advisors in partnership with Xontogeny), American Cancer Society BrightEdge, iSelect Fund, and women’s health and leadership–oriented investors including Portfolia, Avestria Ventures, and Mindshift Capital. Strategic participants in the round included diagnostics and life sciences companies Hologic, Bruker Scientific, and Labcorp.
Mercy reports that the funds will support commercialization of its blood-based ovarian cancer test portfolio based on its proprietary Mercy Halo™ liquid biopsy platform. The company plans to extend the Halo platform to multi-cancer screening and lung cancer detection. Concurrent with the financing, Rob Freelen, Managing Director and investment partner at Sozo Ventures, joined Mercy’s Board of Directors.
This Series B follows a $41 million Series A round closed in April 2023, which was led by Novalis LifeSciences and included participation from Sozo Ventures, Hatteras Venture Partners, iSelect Fund, American Cancer Society BrightEdge, Broadway Angels, and strategic investors such as Labcorp and Bruker. That capital was directed toward advancing the Halo platform, with focus on lung and ovarian cancer applications.
Mercy BioAnalytics is headquartered in Massachusetts and develops diagnostics based on analyzing individual extracellular vesicles (EVs) in blood, using biomarker co-localization techniques that the company says can improve sensitivity and specificity in early disease detection compared to conventional circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) methods.
In May 2024, Mercy obtained Breakthrough Device Designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its Halo Ovarian Cancer Screening Test in asymptomatic, postmenopausal women—a potentially enabling regulatory status given the absence of an FDA-approved ovarian cancer screening test. Mercy cites retrospective studies, including from the UKCTOCS trial sample sets, in which Halo reportedly achieved 82 % sensitivity and 98 % specificity for high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma, outperforming CA125 in the same cohorts.
To support its clinical claims, Mercy has published paired foundational and verification studies in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, describing how its EV biomarker co-localization method discriminates tumor-derived vesicles from benign vesicles and maintains scalability and cost efficiency. In blinded verification assessments, Halo achieved 97 % specificity and 97 % sensitivity for high-grade serous carcinoma, with strong performance even in early stages (I/II). Mercy’s technology was also honored with a Disruptive Technology Award at the 2024 meeting of the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine.
With this fresh injection of capital, Mercy BioAnalytics is poised to accelerate commercialization of its ovarian cancer screening test, further its regulatory strategy, and broaden its diagnostic scope into multi-cancer screening. The path forward will require rigorous clinical validation, regulatory milestones, and uptake by clinicians and health systems—but this funding provides the company a stronger position in the competitive early cancer detection space.
