Hepta is a biotechnology company developing liquid biopsy and AI-based blood tests to enable early, scalable detection and monitoring of chronic diseases, starting with the highly prevalent fatty liver disease known as “metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis” (MASH).
As a Co-founder, what led to the creation of Hepta?
Hepta is really the product of a very long, more than 20-year friendship between my co-founder and I. Early on, we made a somewhat premature pact that one day we’d go to the U.S., go to Silicon Valley, and build a company together. We didn’t know it would be this exact company, but our paths prepared us for it. I went through UCLA and then Illumina, which brought me into genomics, while Soheil went through roles, including at Google, where he focused on AI and its application in medicine.
We later reunited at GRAIL, right at the center of the liquid biopsy revolution over the past decade. After leaving GRAIL in 2022, we saw an opportunity to apply what we’d learned beyond oncology and into chronic disease, starting with liver disease, where the need is immense.
How close are you to making early detection of the liver disease, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), widely available?
We’ve been deep in development mode for the past couple of years and have made strong progress. Now we’re moving, thoughtfully and hopefully swiftly, toward commercialization. Bringing a technology to market takes a number of steps, and we’re working across those, with a plan to launch first as an LDT product focused on specialty hepatology clinicians and clinics, and then expand beyond that into primary care. We’re hopeful that over the next year or two, we can have the test on the market, though there’s still quite a bit of work to do.
Our first and biggest unmet need is detection of MASH, which used to be referred to as NASH as a serious form of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Our target starts with detection, but because we are identifying and studying an underlying molecular signal, we believe it can go beyond detection and help illuminate the biology of the disease. That can support decisions around which therapy may be most useful for a patient and help monitor treatment. And because the platform isn’t liver-specific, once you can read tissue-level biology from blood, it becomes inherently multi-indication. The strategy is to start with liver and MASH, validate rigorously, and then expand in a thoughtful way into adjacent conditions over time as we scale.
Why did you decide to start with fatty liver disease specifically?
The prevalence is surprisingly high. Non-alcoholic fatty liver, formally known as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), affects about 30% of adults, and once you get to MASH, it’s around 5% to 7%. That’s a huge number of people, and the disease can decline health very slowly and silently, in part because people aren’t being detected early. With chronic disease, the timeline is long and the impact can be quiet until it becomes severe. It can lead to cirrhosis, and once someone is decompensated, it becomes extremely serious leading to life-threatening complications.
Detection is actually harder than people imagine because it’s so quiet that you often don’t know who you should be screening. Imaging-based approaches like ultrasound or transient elastography require specialty instruments, trained technicians, and physicians trained to interpret them, and they don’t scale well for a population-level challenge. In the U.S. alone, you may need to screen on the order of 50 to 100 million people, with around 20 million estimated to have MASH, and roughly 7 to 8 million who may need therapy. The math doesn’t work without something scalable. That’s why we believe an easy-to-use test, arguably a blood test, that can be used not only by specialists but also by physicians in settings where people aren’t yet symptomatic, is critical.
When you say you may expand into adjacent areas later, what might those be?
That’s something we’re actively studying. We can imagine applications in cardiovascular and renal areas, but we are yet to disclose where we might expand to next .
What are the main obstacles in financing a company at the intersection of diagnostics and biotech?
We’ve been fortunate to have strong backers, led by Felicis, Illumina Ventures and others. The financing landscape has shifted significantly, especially in diagnostics and liquid biopsy. From the 2015–2016 era through 2021–2022, there was substantial investment, and then it slowed down. The reality is you adjust to the environment, and you need to be nimble and adaptable.
If you have more resources, you can do more, but we’ve been able to operate in a financially efficient way because of our liquid biopsy experience and partnerships in the MASH space, both academically with key opinion leaders and with the pharmaceutical industry. That has helped us generate clinical evidence efficiently. Looking ahead, I’m pragmatic. The bar for evidence and value has risen, but there is still capital out there, and we are confident that if you talk to the right investors and demonstrate what you’ve created with the resources you’ve had, there will be further support.
What are your priorities for Hepta over the next 12 months and beyond?
In the next 6 to 12 months, the priority is bringing a first version of the test to market that can help clinicians. MASH has become an exceptionally active therapeutic area. After a decade or two of failed trials, there have now been two approved drugs, and that could grow to half a dozen or more over the next few years.
As therapies emerge, the bottleneck in care has shifted from treatment to diagnosis, and that’s where we want to help as quickly as possible.
Bringing the test to market also means addressing regulatory, reimbursement, and operational needs, and scaling the team to meet those demands and deliver a top-tier product.
Beyond that, we’re highly scientifically minded, and we’re fortunate to have strong collaborators at academic centres to deepen scientific and clinical understanding of MASH. There’s still a lot to learn, and in some ways it reminds me of earlier years of oncology. In parallel, we want to work closely with industry and biopharma, which is very active in MASH, to help expedite therapy development and support informed treatment decisions for patients. Longer term, the aim is to become a one-stop shop for MASH care, from detection, to informing which therapy and mechanism of action best fits a patient, to monitoring and proactive disease management. Then, in a thoughtful and rigorous way, we would expand into other disease areas over time.
