Ozan Bilgen, co-founder and CEO of BillionToOne, explains why solving minimal residual disease liquid biopsy directly enables universal early cancer screening.
“If you can detect a microscopic level of DNA and be able to say that that is actually cancer, that is the same really technical problem as being able to detect those in healthy patients or, you know, general population.”
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More from Ozan Bilgen
Insight
Bilgen: Interdisciplinary scientists accelerate R&D by an order of magnitude
“We have found that having that iterative cycle within one scientist actually accelerates the work that they do by an order of magnitude.”
Ozan BilgenApr 6, 2026▶ 15:40BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Bilgen: Direct early cancer detection requires raising over $1B pre-revenue
“If you wanted to solve early detection from the very beginning without having this step-by-step approach, you would have to raise more than a billion dollars, you know, without generating a single dollar of revenue.”
Ozan BilgenApr 6, 2026▶ 19:06BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
AssertionSupported
Bilgen: BillionToOne Processes Over 600,000 Tests Annually With ~20% Market Share
“We are processing more than 600,000 tests a year, and in terms of the overall market share, We are close to 20% market share there.”
Ozan BilgenApr 6, 2026▶ 2:32BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
Disclosure
Bilgen: Synthetic DNA removes PCR amplification noise from sequencing data
“So what we have done is to add a synthetic DNA into the patient sample that we get before any amplification happens. These synthetic DNA Allow us to know how much amplification happened at different genomic locations. You know, what are the errors that are bei…”
Ozan BilgenApr 6, 2026▶ 3:51BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
Insight
Bilgen: Chemistry experts rarely possess data science and bioinformatics skills
“People who understand chemistry Tend to be not the kind of data scientists and bioinformaticians that analyze the data.”
Ozan BilgenApr 6, 2026▶ 6:54BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
AssertionSupported
Bilgen: Fetal and tumor cell-free DNA are fundamentally identical to detect
“And, you know, we realized that, you know, fundamentally there is nothing different about, you know, cell-free fetal DNA and cell-free tumor DNA, and the same technology can be applied to both of them.”
Ozan BilgenApr 6, 2026▶ 13:30BillionToOne Is Solving One of Biotech’s Hardest Problems · Y Combinator
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