Over 1.5 million people are diagnosed with cancer annually in the US, and nearly 570,000 die from the disease each year. One of the most difficult aspects of cancer diagnosis and treatment is the fact that cancer is a highly individualized disease with every tumor having distinct characteristics. The preferred approach, targeted therapeutic drug treatment, is difficult because there is no standard procedure for selecting the optimal chemotherapy regimen.

Currently, there are two ways to obtain patients’ cancer cells – the biological sample necessary to perform molecular analysis: a traditional tissue biopsy which is expensive, carries risks, and requires a pathologist’s interpretation; or a LiquidBiopsy® blood draw, which is a new way to retrieve circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from whole blood. LiquidBiopsy is virtually pain free and can be repeated frequently to establish trends in patient response to treatments – crucial because early detection is key to improving patient outcomes.

LungLife AI, formerly known as Cynvenio Biosystems, was founded in 2007 to make personalized medicine a reality in the field of cancer diagnosis and treatment. Their fully automated Liquid Biopsy system is a highly-efficient platform that extracts and analyzes circulating tumor cells in under three hours. This allows physicians to analyze and respond to a patient’s unique physiology to individualize their treatment, including matching them with the best targeted therapy and tracking their response to treatment in real time.

Key Benefits of LungLife’s Technology:

• Improved diagnoses and earlier detection of disease
• Better selection of individualized patient therapies
• Improved drug development through a better understanding of genetic variations
• Timely identification of disease recurrence
• Substantially lower cost of healthcare by shifting treatment to early stage and prevention

LungLife is an incredible example of how companies founded on UCSB technologies are leading their industries and changing peoples’ lives for the better. LungLife’s LiquidBiopsy technology is currently available as a platform for deployment in customer research laboratories or as a CLIA lab service offering CTC cell isolation, enumeration, and molecular analysis from LungLife’s lab in California. In 2025, LungLife announced that it has entered into a conditional exclusive license and distribution agreement for the commercial distribution of its LungLB® test in the US with Circulogene Theranostics, Inc., a US liquid biopsy diagnostics company.