EndoChoice IPO Takes Aim at Cancer
Mark Gilreath took aim at a noble cause: to serve the GI caregivers who daily help patients.
Every year, roughly 50,000 people die from colorectal cancer in the United States. This makes colorectal cancer the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the country. Colonoscopy is widely recognized as the gold standard in colorectal cancer screening.
However, colonoscopies performed with standard endoscopes can’t provide more than about a 170° field of view, which means that doctors have a hard time seeing everything. If you can’t see the potential abnormality, it’s hard to know if it’s there.
EndoChoice’s solution for GI caregivers was to find a way for doctors to see more during the exam. This meant designing a whole new approach to the endoscope to widen the field of view. EndoChoice partnered with the technologists at Peer Medical to find a better solution. Sequoia’s teams in the US and Israel were able to help bring the two companies together.
The result is the Fuse® Full Spectrum Endoscopy®; it provides a panoramic 330° field of view, allowing the endoscopist to see nearly twice as much anatomy at time as traditional endoscopes.
The approach is working: according to the results of a company sponsored and funded tandem clinical trial published in The Lancet Oncology, GI specialists using Fuse® during colonoscopy identified 69% more pre-cancerous polyps than when using standard endoscopes.
Fuse® and EndoChoice’s full suite of GI products currently serve over 2,500 GI departments in the United States and throughout the world.
Sequoia’s teams in the US and Israel are pleased to congratulate Mark and everyone at EndoChoice for their IPO and more importantly, for the work they are doing for GI caregivers everywhere.
-Scott Carter on behalf of Sequoia
