Ada Ventures and Illumina Accelerator back Juno Bio’s $3.8M round to scale vaginal microbiome testing — TFN

• Juno Bio has raised $3.8 million from Ada Ventures, Artesian, Entrepreneur First, and Illumina Accelerator to scale precision vaginal microbiome testing.
• The Oakland-based startup says 67.5% of sufferers who later used its platform had beforehand been misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, or overdiagnosed.
• The capital funds Juno Bio’s first CLIA-certified sequencing lab, devoted totally to ladies’s well being, now reside in Oakland, California.

A physician’s go to for a vaginal an infection typically ends the identical method it began: a swab underneath a microscope, a guess, and a prescription which will or might not work. Juno Bio, a ladies’s well being startup constructed on the idea that the true failure in vaginal healthcare is diagnostic somewhat than therapeutic, has raised $3.8 million to alter that. 

The spherical comes from Ada Ventures, Artesian, Entrepreneur First, and Illumina Accelerator, and coincides with Juno Bio opening its first CLIA-certified sequencing lab in Oakland, California, a facility devoted totally to ladies’s well being, processing checks that have been beforehand outsourced.

The most important problem of getting the analysis proper

Hana Janebdar co-founded Juno Bio in 2018 with Dr. Leighton Turner, ranging from a easy remark: the vaginal microbiome had been virtually totally ignored by mainstream diagnostics, regardless of driving circumstances that ship hundreds of thousands of girls to the physician yearly. 

In keeping with the corporate’s personal scientific information, 67.5% of sufferers who later used its platform had been misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, or overdiagnosed earlier than switching to Juno Bio, and solely 13% had been efficiently handled. Roughly half had co-infections that typical testing missed totally. 

The place a typical scientific take a look at checks for a handful of pathogens, Juno Bio’s next-generation sequencing platform screens for round 10,000 micro organism and fungi alongside 4 frequent STIs, aiming to assist clinicians inform aside circumstances that look an identical underneath a microscope: bacterial vaginosis, yeast infections, cardio vaginitis, cytolytic vaginosis, and hormone-driven modifications.

The aggressive panorama of precision diagnostics

Juno Bio isn’t alone on this area. Evvy, a New York-based rival, has raised $19 million thus far, together with a $14 million Collection A led by Left Lane Capital, and likewise makes use of metagenomic sequencing for vaginal microbiome testing. Daye, in the meantime, is pushing into diagnostics by means of a tampon-based assortment technique. 

The place these two lean towards client wellness and digital care, Juno Bio is positioning itself as a scientific infrastructure, an information layer that different suppliers and pharmaceutical researchers can construct on, somewhat than a direct-to-consumer wellness model.

That distinction issues for the funding thesis. “What they’ve constructed at this stage, with this degree of capital effectivity, is phenomenal. We’re proud to assist the crew as they scale their scientific infrastructure and proceed main innovation on this critically underserved class,” says Check Warner, co-founding accomplice at Ada Ventures.

Janebdar frames the spherical as a scaling second somewhat than a pivot: “This subsequent chapter is about scaling that work, increasing entry to extra actionable care, and persevering with to shut the gender well being hole. We’re extremely grateful to our traders and companions for his or her belief in our crew and our imaginative and prescient as we transfer into this subsequent stage of progress.”

Since its first client take a look at, Juno Bio has offered greater than 20,000 kits and constructed one of many largest vaginal microbiome datasets within the discipline, increasing from wellness into scientific diagnostics, pharmaceutical analysis partnerships, telehealth, and pharmacy integrations. The brand new take a look at is the corporate’s first designed explicitly to tell scientific choices somewhat than simply client curiosity.

The wager behind the spherical is that underinvestment in ladies’s well being is now a correctable market failure somewhat than a everlasting one. The worldwide precision medication market is projected to develop from roughly $112 billion in 2025 to greater than $207 billion by 2030, in keeping with Grand View Research, with genomics and personalised diagnostics as key drivers. Fertility, menopause, and reproductive well being are more and more the place traders count on that progress to pay attention.

Whether or not sequencing-grade diagnostics can truly transfer the needle on a 67.5% misdiagnosis price at scale, throughout a healthcare system that also defaults to the microscope and the whiff take a look at, is the open query. Juno Bio’s wager is that higher information is the remedy healthcare has been lacking all alongside.