- 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 fully to girls’s well being, now stay in Oakland, California.
A health care provider’s go to for a vaginal an infection usually ends the identical manner it began: a swab underneath a microscope, a guess, and a prescription that will or could not work. Juno Bio, a girls’s well being startup constructed on the idea that the true failure in vaginal healthcare is diagnostic relatively than therapeutic, has raised $3.8 million to vary 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 fully to girls’s well being, processing assessments that have been beforehand outsourced.
The largest problem of getting the prognosis proper
Hana Janebdar co-founded Juno Bio in 2018 with Dr. Leighton Turner, ranging from a easy remark: the vaginal microbiome had been nearly fully 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 knowledge, 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 standard testing missed fully.
The place a regular scientific check checks for a handful of pathogens, Juno Bio’s next-generation sequencing platform screens for round 10,000 micro organism and fungi alongside 4 widespread STIs, aiming to assist clinicians inform aside circumstances that look similar 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 house. Evvy, a New York-based rival, has raised $19 million so far, together with a $14 million Sequence 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 a tampon-based assortment technique.
The place these two lean towards shopper 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, relatively 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 staff as they scale their scientific infrastructure and proceed main innovation on this critically underserved class,” says Check Warner, co-founding companion at Ada Ventures.
Janebdar frames the spherical as a scaling second relatively 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 staff and our imaginative and prescient as we transfer into this subsequent stage of development.”
Since its first shopper check, Juno Bio has bought 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 check is the corporate’s first designed explicitly to tell scientific selections relatively than simply shopper curiosity.
The wager behind the spherical is that underinvestment in girls’s well being is now a correctable market failure relatively 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 anticipate that development to pay attention.
Whether or not sequencing-grade diagnostics can really transfer the needle on a 67.5% misdiagnosis charge at scale, throughout a healthcare system that also defaults to the microscope and the whiff check, is the open query. Juno Bio’s wager is that higher knowledge is the remedy healthcare has been lacking all alongside.
