Medical devices & diagnostics · Liquid biopsy

Delee

A Monterrey team built a machine that filters circulating tumor cells out of whole blood, published two papers on it, and raised about $2.75 million. The public record goes quiet after July 2023.

Nine floors

A business undergraduate at the Tecnologico de Monterrey saw the chief executive of Heineken walking toward an elevator, and got in with him.

“He was on his way up to the Tec de Monterrey Dean Offices on the 14th floor and told me to come with him. By the 9th floor I had finished my first real elevator pitch!” Liza Velarde told the Cartier Women’s Initiative in 2019. The executive donated funds, which paid for a first prototype.

What the prototype had to do is hard. A tube of blood holds roughly 40.5 billion cells per 7.5 millilitres. In a cancer patient, between one and a thousand of them are tumor cells shed by a solid tumor. Finding those cells, intact and usable, is the whole business.

Why the standard method misses cells

Circulating tumor cells matter because they carry the tumor’s genetics into a vein. Count them and you have a marker. Sequence them and you have a reason to change a drug.

The reference method, the CellSearch system, catches those cells by grabbing proteins on their surface. Delee’s argument was that the surface cannot be trusted. Tumor cells entering the bloodstream turn those proteins down, so a capture method keyed to them loses the cells that have travelled furthest.

So the CytoCatch platform sorted on physics instead: a membrane microfilter that separates cells by size and deformability, with sample preparation, filtration and fluorescent staining run by the machine. A second box, the imaging system, was a four colour fluorescence microscope the company built, with software that picks the stained cells out of the field. No technician counts anything.

Three founders from one classroom

Velarde, Alejandro Abarca Blanco and Juan Felipe Yee de Leon met in college and were pushed into a project by a teacher. Abarca, a physicist, became chief technology officer. Yee de Leon, a biomedical and electronic engineer, had worked on microfluidic cell isolation before Delee. Velarde, an international business graduate, ran the company.

They incorporated in Delaware on November 14, 2016, went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2017 batch, and later StartX. The board they assembled was more senior than the founders: Joost Leeflang, former global head of commerce for the medical imaging business of Philips Healthcare; two Tecnologico de Monterrey professors; David Mohler, an orthopedic surgical oncologist at Stanford University Medical Center; and Lauro S. Gomez, research director of urology at the Hospital Universitario Dr. Jose Eleuterio Gonzalez in Monterrey, where the first patient samples were run.

What the instruments did in print

Two papers in Scientific Reports carry the evidence. The first, in September 2019, described the automated microscope and reported agreement between its counts and a reference instrument.

The second, in May 2020, characterised the filtration device. Across four prostate cancer cell lines, the team reported capture efficiencies greater than 93 percent on 7.5 millilitre samples spiked with 100 cancer cells, with the captured cells still viable. From samples spiked with 50 LNCaP cells they recovered the androgen receptor mutation T878A by RT-PCR and Sanger sequencing. That is the part that matters clinically: a cell you can sequence is a cell that can change a prescription.

Then the patients. Eight men with metastatic prostate cancer, tumor cells found in all eight, mean 21 cells per millilitre. Eight for eight is a feasibility series, not a validation study, and the authors said as much: a larger cohort was being run. It has not appeared in the literature.

The detour, and then the quiet

In 2021 the same microfluidics team published an automated ELISA on a chip for detecting antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, tested on 22 serum samples under a Monterrey ethics protocol. A reasonable thing for a microfluidics shop to build in 2021. It is also the last product the group published.

The financial record thins at the same rate. Delee reported no revenue in any fiscal year it disclosed to the SEC. Net loss ran $714,442 in 2020, $444,284 in 2021, then $37,205 in 2022, a company spending almost nothing. The annual report filed in July 2023 counts three employees. Nothing since.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the engineering was real and it was published where the authors had to show their numbers. What never arrived was the second half, the larger patient cohort, a regulatory file in any jurisdiction, and a paying customer. The pre-order figure grew from $1.2 million to more than $2.5 million across three years while reported revenue stayed at zero, which means those pre-orders were letters of interest rather than money. A company with three employees, no revenue and a $37,205 annual loss is not scaling. It is waiting.

What to watch

• An overdue annual report. Regulation Crowdfunding issuers file a Form C-AR each year; Delee’s last covered 2022.
• The larger prostate cohort promised in the 2020 paper. Publication would be the single strongest sign the science continued somewhere.
• The instruments. A filtration platform and a bespoke microscope with published performance can be sold or licensed even when a company stops.
• Where the founders land next. All three are named on the patents and the papers.

In their words

Related companies

• X-ZELL: Also in Diagnostics. A Singapore and Bangkok company that set out to find early cancer in a 10mL blood draw, published one 146 patient prostate study, then turned the staining machine built
• Notable Labs: Also in Diagnostics. A blood cancer company that screened drugs against a patient’s own cells to predict who would respond, in-licensed a shelved Boehringer Ingelheim compound, reached
• Clear Gene: Also in Diagnostics. An RNA test built to tell a surgeon whether the whole tumor came out
• Isabl: Also in Diagnostics. A Memorial Sloan Kettering spin out that reads the whole tumor genome and transcriptome instead of a gene panel

Sources

1. Public recordForm D, Delee Corp, CIK 0001790674SEC EDGAR · Dec 9, 2019
2. Public recordForm C-U progress updates, three offeringsSEC EDGAR · 2020 to 2022
3. Public recordForm C-AR annual report for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022SEC EDGAR · Jul 24, 2023
4. Public recordEDGAR filing history, Delee Corp, CIK 0001790674SEC EDGAR · accessed Sep 22, 2026
5. Public recordCharacterization of a novel automated microfiltration device for circulating tumor cellsScientific Reports · May 5, 2020
6. Public recordHigh-Throughput Automated Microscopy of Circulating Tumor CellsScientific Reports · Sep 24, 2019
7. Public recordAutomated ELISA On-Chip for the Detection of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 AntibodiesSensors · Oct 13, 2021
8. Public recordopenFDA queries, 510(k), premarket approval and establishment registrationFDA · Sep 22, 2026
9. Public recordClinicalTrials.gov registry queries for Delee and CytoCatchClinicalTrials.gov · Sep 22, 2026
10. InterviewDelee Co-Founder Liza Velarde on Improving and Personalizing Cancer TreatmentKingscrowd, Zee Zhong · Nov 5, 2021
11. IndependentDelee deal pages with round and financial tablesKingscrowd · 2019 to 2022
12. IndependentFellow portrait, Liza VelardeCartier Women’s Initiative · March 2019
13. IndependentDelee, transforming cancer detection and treatmentEmerald Emerging Markets Case Studies · Oct 7, 2021
14. CompanyDelee offering page, founder and director biographiesRepublic · 2019
15. CompanyDelee offering page, traction and funding claimsRepublic · 2022
16. CompanyDelee directory entry, batch, team size, statusY Combinator · accessed Sep 22, 2026
17. Differs from recorddelee.co, the issuer website named in the SEC filings, now unrelated contentAccessed Sep 22, 2026