Diagnostics & precision oncology · Liquid biopsy
Cambridge Cancer Genomics
A Y Combinator backed British company that used repeat blood draws and machine learning to tell an oncologist when a cancer drug had stopped working. Dante Labs bought it in June 2021 and the UK company was dissolved in January 2023.
A bar in Queens’ College
Business Weekly gave the origin story in one line in February 2019: the business itself was founded in the Queens’ College bar in Cambridge. Four doctoral students had arrived at the same conclusion from four directions.
For one of them the reason was not academic. Harry Clifford, a bioinformatics PhD from Oxford doing postdoctoral work in Cambridge with Cancer Research UK, watched a close friend receive a terminal cancer diagnosis at 21 in 2016, with all standard treatment options exhausted, according to his profile for the patient network Lyfebulb.
The pitch was blunt. “How patients were being treated was stuck in the ’80s,” John Cassidy told TechCrunch in August 2017, days after the company came out of Y Combinator. The claim for the technology was specific and testable: “You can detect when people should be off of treatment 7 months earlier than traditional means of analysis,” he said.
A target that will not hold still
The scientific case was about time, not detection. A solid biopsy samples a tumour once. Treatment then changes the thing being described.
Cassidy used the same example repeatedly. Patients with mutations in the EGFR gene are treated with erlotinib, and after eight months about 80 per cent are resistant, he told Labiotech in May 2018. “Cancer evolves. Your tumor today is not going to be your tumor in three months,” he said in the same interview.
A liquid biopsy reads fragments of tumour DNA shed into the blood, so it can be repeated. The company proposed drawing samples every two weeks to a month, sequencing them, and running machine learning over the series rather than any single snapshot. It said the method could identify relapse an average of seven months earlier than standard practice.
Cassidy was careful about the limits of his own tools. “We’re in a bit of a hype-cycle of artificial intelligence just now,” he told the Center for Data Innovation in 2018, warning that one bad national rollout could set the field back a decade.
Four founders, and titles that kept moving
Cassidy had a Glasgow pharmacology degree, a Cambridge PhD in molecular genetics and research posts at Cancer Research UK and MedImmune. TechCrunch reported that his father had been head of cancer therapies at Glasgow University and his grandfather a cancer researcher there. Nirmesh Patel came from translational cancer medicine at King’s College London, Evaline Tsai from a Princeton degree in chemical and biological engineering.
The job titles shifted. TechCrunch listed Clifford as chief scientific officer and Patel as chief medical officer in 2017; by 2019 Pharmaceutical Technology was quoting Patel as chief scientific officer and Lyfebulb described Clifford as chief technology officer. All four made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe science and healthcare list in February 2019, aged 25 to 30.
Companies House shows a sharper break. Clifford, Patel and Tsai were appointed directors of the UK company on 25 January 2017 and all three resigned on 19 July 2017, the year it went through Y Combinator. Cassidy remained the only named director and the only person with significant control.
The good year
2019 was when the evidence arrived. In March the company joined the Genomics England Discovery Forum, aiming to calculate tumour mutational burden from blood rather than tissue. At ESMO in the autumn it published an abstract benchmarking OncOS, its cloud pipeline, at a positive predictive value of 87.4 per cent against 75.4 per cent for the Broad Institute pipeline and 80.1 per cent for MD Anderson. In December it presented five papers at NeurIPS.
Headcount reached 25 on the company’s count. “Cancer centres around the world are trusting us with their genomic and clinical outcomes data,” Cassidy told Business Weekly that February, in a piece reporting about $4.5 million raised and a next round that might reach $20 million to $50 million.
The Series A that never came
“We’re looking for a Series A next year, probably Q1,” Clifford told the Cambridge Independent in December 2019. None was ever announced.
The accounts show what happened instead. Cash at bank fell from £981,051 at 31 January 2018 to £588,801, then £291,458, then £33,886 by 31 July 2021, against £298,193 of trade creditors. The average number of employees in the UK company was 18 in the year to 31 January 2020 and nil in every period after.
In June 2020 came a three way tumour profiling deal with Dante Labs in Italy and Nonacus in Birmingham. A year later Dante bought the company. “CCG will be absorbed into Dante Labs,” Cassidy told the Cambridge Independent, adding that he, Patel and Clifford would help integrate the software and might continue in advisory capacities. No terms were disclosed. A strike off application followed on 5 October 2022 and the company was dissolved on 17 January 2023.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Company life | Company 10583580, incorporated 25 Jan 2017, SIC 72110. Voluntary strike off applied for 5 Oct 2022, dissolved 17 Jan 2023. Zero charges ever registered, so no secured lending. | Public record |
| Financials | Cash at bank £981,051 (Jan 2018), £588,801, £291,458, £33,886 (Jul 2021), £142,699 (Jun 2022). Accumulated losses reached £3,507,815 by July 2021. Every filing unaudited under the small company regime. | Public record |
| Headcount | Accounts give an average of 3, then 12, then 18 employees in the year to 31 Jan 2020, then nil. The 2019 filing had reported that same year as nil, so the company’s own accounts disagree. Press reported 25 staff in 2019. | Filings disagree |
| Peer reviewed work | One journal paper found: DRIVE, in Cancers, 3 Jun 2021, PMID 34205004, with Cassidy, Patel and Clifford as authors. It reports over 80 per cent accuracy and warns that considerable care must be taken given the small benchmark dataset. | Public record |
| OncOS benchmark | ESMO 2019 abstract 1436P, Annals of Oncology: positive predictive value 87.4 per cent on the MC3 dataset. Funding listed as Cambridge Cancer Genomics; all eight authors declare stock or employment. | Public record |
| Trials and grants | No registered clinical trial found. UKRI lists the company only as a partner on an MRC studentship and a linked organisation on an EPSRC grant. No Innovate UK award found. | Not found |
| Seven month claim | The line about identifying relapse an average of seven months earlier than standard practice runs through company copy and press from 2017 to 2021. No peer reviewed study supporting it was found. | Company-stated |
| Delaware parent | Cambridge Cancer Genomics, Inc, Delaware registration 6453634, registered a UK establishment on 16 Jan 2018. It is still listed as active, with accounts recorded as due to 31 Jan 2018 and none filed since. | Public record |
Read plainly: the software was real and the benchmarks were published, but they were benchmarks against reference datasets, run and funded by the company. The clinical claim that gave the company its reason to exist never reached a peer reviewed paper or a registered trial. The runway ended first.
What to watch
- Whether OncOS still runs. Dante said in 2021 it would be folded into its Immensa software that summer. No deployment report has surfaced.
- The overseas company, still holding an active UK establishment registration with no accounts on file.
- The seven month figure, the central claim for five years and still unpublished.
- Where the people went. Cassidy is listed as a general partner at Kindred Capital. Clifford leads product for NVIDIA’s digital biology frameworks, BioNeMo and Parabricks.
In their words
“How patients were being treated was stuck in the ’80s,”
John Cassidy, co-founder and CEO, TechCrunch, 2017 · Independent
“You can detect when people should be off of treatment 7 months earlier than traditional means of analysis,”
John Cassidy, TechCrunch, 2017 · Independent
“Cancer evolves. Your tumor today is not going to be your tumor in three months,”
John Cassidy, Labiotech.eu, 2018 · Interview
“We’re in a bit of a hype-cycle of artificial intelligence just now.”
John Cassidy, Center for Data Innovation, 2018 · Interview
“Cancer centres around the world are trusting us with their genomic and clinical outcomes data,”
John Cassidy, Business Weekly, 2019 · Independent
“We’re looking for a Series A next year, probably Q1.”
Harry Clifford, co-founder, Cambridge Independent, December 2019 · Independent
“CCG will be absorbed into Dante Labs,”
John Cassidy, Cambridge Independent, July 2021 · Independent
“The data is impressive and we look forward to implementing OncOS globally.”
Andrea Riposati, CEO, Dante Labs, June 2021 · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordRegister entry and filing history, company 10583580
- Public recordOfficers, PSC and charges, company 10583580
- Public recordAnnual accounts, company 10583580, five filings 2018 to 2022
- Public recordOverseas company record FC034955
- Public recordIdentifying Cancer Drivers Using DRIVE, Cancers 13(11)
- Public recordOncOS, abstract 1436P, Annals of Oncology
- Public recordOrganisation and project records
- IndependentCambridge Cancer Genomics offers a better way to gauge effective cancer treatments
- InterviewCombining Liquid Biopsy and Artificial Intelligence to Outrun Cancer
- Interview5 Q’s for John Cassidy, CEO of Cambridge Cancer Genomics
- IndependentGenomics England-CCG partner on immunotherapies for cancer
- IndependentCancer AI business set for significant funding round
- Independent2019 Europe 30 Under 30, Science & Healthcare
- IndependentPersonalised AI oncology role for Cambridge Cancer Genomics
- IndependentCCG to collaborate with Dante Labs and Nonacus
- IndependentNew York’s Dante Labs acquires Cambridge Cancer Genomics
- IndependentHarry Clifford, entrepreneur profile
- IndependentHarry Clifford, speaker profile
- CompanyJohn W Cassidy, Kindred Capital
- CompanyDante Labs acquires Cambridge Cancer Genomics
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
