Episteme Prognostics sells $5.1M in ongoing $6.02M offering for pancreatic cancer test

Why it matters

Episteme's round backs a founder translating years of pancreatic cancer research into a treatment-selection test. The value will depend on prospective clinical validation, not another retrospective association.

Surajit Dhara has raised fresh capital for Episteme Prognostics, the Brooklyn precision-medicine developer built around his research into pancreatic cancer and chromatin accessibility. Episteme Prognostics has sold $5,091,997 in an ongoing $6,017,000 equity offering, according to a Form D filed September 4.

The first sale occurred on August 20. The current filing reports 22 investors and $925,003 remaining to sell. It does not identify the investors, a lead investor or a valuation. The filing identifies Dhara as CEO and director, alongside directors Gregory Ho, Jason Rifkin and Robert Warren.

For Dhara, the financing funds an unusually long translation from academic cancer biology toward a clinical product. Before starting Episteme, he worked on clinical biomarker discovery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and later became a senior research scientist at Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center. His public profile also lists Johns Hopkins University from 2003 through 2009. Dartmouth materials described Dhara as contributing to the invention of the ATAC-array technology at the center of Episteme's work.

Turning chromatin accessibility into a treatment decision

Episteme is developing PancEpistemeDx, a laboratory-developed test intended to predict whether a pancreatic tumor will respond to chemotherapy before treatment starts. Episteme's ATAC-array approach measures chromatin accessibility, which indicates which regions of DNA are open to the cellular machinery that regulates gene activity.

The scientific foundation came from a 2021 Nature Communications study co-led by Dhara. Researchers analyzed treatment-naive tumors surgically removed from 54 patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and reported chromatin-accessibility associations with disease-free-survival outcomes after chemotherapy. The study established a prognostic association in a retrospective cohort. It did not establish through a prospective clinical trial that PancEpistemeDx can safely direct patients away from a chemotherapy regimen or improve survival.

The distinction matters because Episteme's commercial proposition goes beyond estimating prognosis: Episteme wants the assay to influence treatment selection before a patient loses time to ineffective therapy.

An earlier Episteme executive summary said the assay could combine ATAC-array results with histopathology and immunohistochemistry and produce results in three days. The document described clinical implementation as a long-term goal and said Episteme was "raising $5M to aggressively enter into the market." It also identified Leach, a pancreatic cancer researcher and former Memorial Sloan Kettering center director, as co-founder and scientific advisory board chair.

Episteme has continued developing the underlying platform. In April 2026, Dhara and collaborators presented a targeted chromatin accessibility and mutation sequencing method called tCAM-seq. The work combines chromatin-accessibility profiling with mutation detection for pancreatic cancer. It remains early research, though it shows Dhara is trying to make one assay answer both chemotherapy-response and mutation-guided treatment questions.

The funding history is larger than one seed check

The new filing gives Episteme substantially more capital than the $550,000 financing disclosed in a March 2025 Form D and independently reported by Castle Placement. The filing classified that earlier financing as an offering of options, warrants or other rights to acquire securities. It reported one investor, a $2.5 million target, $550,000 sold and $1.95 million remaining.

The $550,000 figure does not capture Episteme's full filing history. In its April 14, 2023 Form D, Episteme reported a $3,701,047 offering, with $3,136,041 sold and $565,006 remaining. In a May 22, 2023 amendment, the company reported $4,111,039 offered and sold, including the conversion of outstanding notes into preferred-stock shares. The amendment updated the earlier offering, so the two filings should not be treated as separate rounds when calculating lifetime funding.

The current Form D is cleaner on the immediate transaction. Episteme is selling equity under Rule 506(b), reported no commissions or finder fees and declined to disclose revenue. Its 22 investors represent a much broader syndicate than the single investor listed in the 2025 filing. The identities behind those checks remain outside the filing, as does the price they placed on Episteme.

The next milestone is clinical evidence

Dhara is entering a field where several developers are trying to predict cancer-drug response from different biological inputs. Perthera has described a pancreatic cancer predictor based on genomic, clinical and outcomes data, while Valar Labs is developing an AI system that analyzes digitized pathology slides. Episteme's narrower bet is that chromatin accessibility contains treatment-response information missed by standard mutation panels and routine pathology.

The financing gives Dhara room to move that bet toward a usable diagnostic. Public materials do not establish that PancEpistemeDx is available for routine clinical use, covered by insurers or validated in a prospective treatment-selection study. Episteme describes PancEpistemeDx as being advanced as a laboratory-developed test.

The clinical burden is now clear. Episteme must show that its chromatin signal can identify chemotherapy responders before treatment, work reliably on real-world tumor samples and change care without withholding an effective regimen. The $5.1 million financing gives Dhara additional capital for that work. It also moves Episteme from an academic discovery story into the harder phase, where a promising biomarker has to survive clinical validation.