Why we're building for India first.
The gap between what precision oncology could do for cancer patients and what it actually does is nowhere sharper than in India. We chose to launch here first — because this is where the gap is biggest, and where closing it changes the most lives.
The gap Indian oncologists live with.
More than half of advanced-cancer patients worldwide are denied access to precision oncology because the molecular test that would guide their treatment never happens. In India, that fraction is even higher — driven by the practical realities of Indian oncology practice, not by any shortage of clinical intent.
A pulmonologist in a Tier-2 city gets a small biopsy back from a suspected NSCLC patient. The tumour content is low. The oncologist knows a molecular panel would change first-line therapy — but the nearest reference lab is a plane away, will take three weeks to return a result, and there's a one-in-four chance the sample fails outright. The patient is not going to wait three weeks for chemotherapy that might turn out to have been unnecessary.
So the oncologist starts empirical treatment. And by the time the molecular answer would have changed the decision, the moment has passed.
What we're changing.
ONCO X is the Molecular Diagnostics vertical of Biosite Research — a two-decade-old Indian clinical research organisation. We built ONCO X to make the molecular test practical enough that it actually happens: fast enough to influence the next clinic visit, robust enough to work on the samples labs actually receive, and priced to run in the hospitals that actually treat most Indian patients.
Our first product line — PulmoSmart and LiquiSmart Lung — brings that to NSCLC. A guideline-complete 11-gene panel, DNA + RNA in a single workflow, with turnaround measured in days not weeks and failure rates measured in single digits not quarters. All of it running on the QuantStudio™ 5 real-time PCR platform that is already installed in hundreds of Indian labs.
What this means for patients.
- A molecular answer before the next appointment — not a delay that pushes chemotherapy into the treatment window where a targeted therapy would have worked.
- A test that doesn't fail on the small, low-tumour-content samples that are the reality of Indian biopsies.
- A liquid-biopsy option when tissue isn't available — and a serial resistance test for patients already on treatment.
- Testing that reaches beyond the reference-lab cities — because it runs on hardware labs already own, not million-dollar sequencers they don't.
Where we're going.
Lung is where we started because it's where the biggest measurable difference exists. But the gap looks similar in colorectal, in bladder, in the growing need for MRD monitoring after curative therapy. Our roadmap is straightforward: take the same platform economics — fast, sensitive, PCR-based, plus our own NGS platform coming in months — and apply them one indication at a time.
India first. Because this is where it matters most.