Yuga Bio’s mission is to help every cancer patient, regardless of entrepreneurial experience or wealth, leverage founder mode, bringing clarity, continuity, and intelligence that complex longitudinal cancer care demands.

Cancer care is leaving most patients behind the science: assays, panels, and trial infrastructure keep improving, but most patients never receive the biological depth or structured exposure to advanced therapeutic science. National snapshots quantify that mismatch.

~2M

Millions of families are entering cancer care each year.

National statistics project roughly two million new invasive U.S. cancer cases in 2025, excluding most skin carcinomas.¹

~35%

Only a third of adults with newly diagnosed advanced cancer had molecular testing documented in insurance claims in the study window.

A claims analysis from 2018 through 2022 found evidence of molecular testing for about 35% of that cohort, so the majority had no such signal in billing data.²

~20%

Broad tumor DNA panels remain unusual even for privately insured people with newly diagnosed metastatic solid tumors.

In that population, mean uptake of broad genomic profiling was about 20% across 2020–2022.³

< 15%

Structured research—whether a treatment trial or a biorepository—still touches only a small fraction of patients in national estimates.

Commission on Cancer program data from 2013 through 2017 estimated national participation at 7% for treatment trials and 13% for biorepository studies.⁴

Two tailwinds

Reading DNA keeps getting cheaper. The Carlson curve tracks the collapsing cost of DNA sequencing over time. Biological measurement is improving on trajectories that look more like early computing than like traditional medicine.⁵

The cost of intelligence is collapsing too. At fixed capability, the price to run large language models has fallen sharply; benchmark analyses find the cost to hit a given performance level dropping by orders of magnitude over short horizons—making reasoning over dense clinical and genomic text far more accessible than even a few years ago.⁶

Yuga Bio benefits from both tailwinds: cheap, deep molecular signal on one side, and cheap, scalable interpretation and coordination on the other—so patients are not left alone to integrate multiomics, immune repertoires, and whatever assays come next with the patchwork of care documents between visits.⁵,⁶

Founder mode

Sid Sijbrandij going founder mode on his cancer is a powerful patient story: when standard of care had little left to offer, he did not treat that as the end of the road. He leaned into bespoke biology on his own tumor, leveraging maximal diagnostics, and arriving at therapeutics chosen or co-created from molecular insight. The transferable lesson is not wealth or celebrity; it is that the last line of standard of care does not have to be the last meaningful chapter of a life when you can run tumor-native science in earnest.

Today, the space between MyChart moments still effectively requires patients to assemble that kind of program themselves: information, advocates, and options the system was not designed to deliver by default. That works for a vanishingly small demographic. It should not be a prerequisite for staying in the game. Yuga Bio exists to bring access to advanced treatment options to as many patients as possible.

Team

Investors

Even One Ventures

References

1. Siegel RL, Giaquinto AN, Jemal A. Cancer statistics, 2025. CA Cancer J Clin. 2025. Projected 2,041,910 new invasive cases in the U.S. (excl. basal/squamous skin and most in situ disease). https://doi.org/10.3322/caac.21871
2. DaCosta Byfield S, et al. Biomarker testing approaches, treatment selection, and cost of care among adults with advanced cancer. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(7):e2519963. (~35% with evidence of molecular testing; cohort 2018–2022.) https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.19963
3. Wang X, et al. Adoption of broad genomic profiling in patients with cancer. JAMA Oncol. 2025;11(6):666-668. (20.3% with broad profiling; 15.1% in 2020 to 24.3% in 2022 among 51,908 privately insured metastatic solid tumor patients.) https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaoncol.2025.0499
4. Unger JM, et al. National estimates of the participation of patients with cancer in clinical research studies based on Commission on Cancer accreditation data. J Clin Oncol. 2024;42(18):2139-2148. (7.1% treatment trials; 12.9% biorepository studies; 2013–2017.) https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.23.01030
5. Carlson R. DNA cost and productivity data (Carlson curves), including sequencing and synthesis trends. https://www.synthesis.cc/synthesis/2022/10/dna-synthesis-cost-data See also: Carlson RE. The changing economics of DNA synthesis. Nat Biotechnol. 2009;27(12):1091-1094. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1209-1091
6. Epoch AI. LLM inference price trends (cost to reach fixed benchmark performance). https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends