Dedicated to bringing cutting-edge technology to all practices and physicians treating cancer patients, Avenda Health aims to improve patient outcomes, preserve quality of life and set a new standard of cancer care. Afterall, patients shouldn’t be forced to choose between treating their prostate cancer and maintaining their quality of life.  

Brit Berry-Pusey, Founder & CEO at Avenda Health became interested in startups whilst studying biomedical physics. She explained: “Someone told me if you want to help thousands of people, being a physician is great. But if you want to potentially help millions or even billions, consider being a scientist because your discoveries have such a huge impact.” And so, Brit began her path to becoming a scientist.  

Brit’s eyes were further opened in graduate school when another mentor explained the importance of discoveries making it out of the lap, into the commercial world to have the greatest impact. It was at grad school that Brit met her other co-founders, Shyam Natarajan and Leonard S. Marks.  

Launched in 2017, Avenda Health is changing the paradigm for cancer. Prostate cancer can be challenging to see, as MRI underestimates the true extent, and each patient is unique. 50% of men with prostate cancer will get sexual or urinary dysfunction caused by therapy itself. Avenda Health has hypothesised with its prostate management platform iQuest, it can identify where the cancer is and treat just the cancerous lesion, leaving the rest of the health prostate intact. This means it can cure the cancer, but also preserve quality of life.  

iQuest combines patient specific data and deep learning algorithms to create a unique, tailored cancer probability map and visualise the location of cancer in 3D for intervention planning. This is paired with a proprietary targeted ablative therapy that can treat patients in a doctor’s office under local anaesthesia.  

Whilst this idea of focal therapy is not new, in prostate cancer it is something nobody else is doing, explained Brit.  

Avenda has already received an investigational device exemption allowing its products to be used to treat prostate cancer patients in a randomly controlled trial against standard of care. A study of 50 patients demonstrated that iQuest improved tumour margin creation over conventional treatment planning from 56% to 80%.  

Highs and lows 

“I’m biased, but I think we have the best team. We currently have eight full time employees with extensive backgrounds. We have a great clinical team as we’re wrapping up our pivotal trial and we have a great operations team and phenomenal engineers,” said Brit. 

Avenda Health started the company with a $3m grant from the National Cancer Institute. The company has recently raised $10m in Series B funding led by VCapital, bringing Avenda’s total funding to $16m. 

“We’ve been fortunate to have very supportive investors who really are passionate about this disease. They want to see something improve, and I really can’t say enough about our investors, especially our initial investors,” exclaimed Brit.  

She added: “I think its important for all startups when looking at investors, to make sure you have investors not only that are bringing the capital to help your company grow, but they believe in the vision.” 

As we all know, startups are a rollercoaster: “The highs are so high, but the lows are low. I have found it important to have great co-founders with an underlying respect for eachother. I can’t imagine doing this alone,” said Brit.  

Unsurprisingly, a true highlight for Brit has been seeing patients whose lives, and families’ lives, have been changed because of Avenda. “Being able to interact with them to see the impact we’ve had on their lives is so beneficial.” 

What has also been incredible on the journey is seeing Avenda transform from an idea into a company. Brit explained this will never stop being rewarding.  

Plans 

Avenda is looking to open its Series C funding round shortly, again, looking for other great investors that believe in what it is doing and want to help to improve the lives of patients with prostate cancer.  

Whilst its foal laser ablation system is already cleared by the FDA for soft tissue ablation, Avenda anticipates FDA approval for its iQuest software component by the end of the year. Avenda is also recruiting clinical trial sites for its clinical trial. 

“We’re also excited to get into the lives of patients with prostate cancer. I think 2023 is going to be a great year for Avenda Health,” said Brit.  

Brit concluded with some inspiring words for startup founders: “There are no problems, just opportunities. There are so many opportunities in healthcare to make improvements. I encourage budding entreprenurs to consider the healthcare space for their future startups. If we all work together, we can really improve healthcare across the world and improve the lives of so many patients.”