For patients diagnosed with high-grade glioma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, the path forward has changed remarkably little in two decades. Surgeons cut out what they can see, radiation and temozolomide chase the rest, and median survival sits stubbornly around 15 months. The blood-brain barrier, the dense lining of capillaries that protects the brain from toxins, also blocks roughly 98% of small-molecule drugs and nearly all large biologics. It is the single most frustrating piece of anatomy in oncology.
Cordance Medical, a Mountain View company founded in 2018, is betting that a noninvasive beam of focused ultrasound, paired with intravenously injected microbubbles, can open that barrier on demand, in a precise spot, for a few hours at a time. The company's NeuroAccess device received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in October 2023 for enabling liquid biopsy in brain tumors [Cordance Medical, October 2023]. In November 2025, Cordance announced an oversubscribed $8 million seed round led by Sonder Capital, with participation from Shanda Grab Ventures, Angel Physician's Fund, SmartGateVC, and R42 [PRNewswire, November 2025].
The bet
The NeuroAccess platform is designed to do two things that have historically required either a craniotomy or a needle through the skull. First, it lets clinicians collect tumor-derived DNA, RNA, and proteins from a standard blood draw after the barrier is briefly opened over the lesion, a procedure the field calls sonobiopsy. Second, it can push therapeutics, including radiopharmaceuticals, antibodies, and small molecules, into a tumor that would otherwise see only a trickle of dose. A first-in-human prospective trial of sonobiopsy in high-grade glioma patients, using neuronavigation-guided focused ultrasound, was published in npj Precision Oncology in 2023 [Cordance Medical Publications].
The near-term commercial wedge is diagnostics. Today, monitoring a glioblastoma patient's response to therapy means serial MRI scans that can confuse treatment effect with tumor progression, and occasionally a repeat surgical biopsy that carries real morbidity. A reliable liquid biopsy that captures genomic information from the tumor itself, on a cadence the patient can tolerate, would change how oncologists adjust therapy. The therapeutic delivery use case is larger but further out. In February 2025, Cordance and EXACT Therapeutics reported that NeuroAccess more than doubled radiopharmaceutical uptake in glioblastoma mouse models, with reported increases of 127 to 145% [PRNewswire, February 2025]. That data is preclinical, and the gap between mouse brains and human brains in this field is well documented, but the direction is the one investors and clinicians have been waiting to see.
Why the timing matters
Focused ultrasound for the blood-brain barrier has moved from laboratory curiosity to active clinical category in the last five years. Israel-based Insightec, the most established player, has run BBB-opening trials in Alzheimer's, glioblastoma, and ALS using its Exablate Neuro system, and academic groups at Sunnybrook, West Virginia University, Columbia, and WashU have published feasibility data in humans. The category question is no longer whether you can open the barrier safely. It is who can do it with hardware light enough, fast enough, and cheap enough to fit into a routine oncology or neurology workflow rather than an MRI suite booked weeks out.
That is the seam Cordance is aiming at. The company describes NeuroAccess as a neuronavigation-guided system rather than an MRI-guided one, which, if the targeting accuracy holds up in pivotal data, would meaningfully shrink the per-procedure cost and the infrastructure footprint. Sonder Capital, the lead investor on the seed, has a portfolio history in medical devices that need to thread exactly that needle between clinical performance and procedural economics.
The team
Founder Bhaskar Ramamurthy, PhD, spent more than 25 years in ultrasound engineering at Acuson, Siemens, Innervision, and SRI International before starting Cordance [Cordance Medical]. Acuson, in particular, was one of the foundational companies in modern diagnostic ultrasound, and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation has described Ramamurthy as an ultrasound pioneer whose work in diagnostic imaging seeded his interest in brain applications [Focused Ultrasound Foundation]. Ryan Dittamore serves as CEO and previously was Chief Business Officer of Decipher Biosciences, the prostate cancer genomics company Veracyte acquired for $600 million, and Chief of Medical Innovation at Epic Sciences [Cordance Medical]. The combination of an ultrasound hardware founder and a commercial leader from the precision oncology diagnostics world is, on paper, the right pairing for a device whose first revenue will likely come from a CPT-coded liquid biopsy procedure.
The clinical bench includes Eric Leuthardt, MD, a neurosurgeon and professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose lab has been central to the academic sonobiopsy work, and Hong Chen, PhD, a biomedical engineer also at WashU [Cordance Medical].
The funding picture
Seed round (Nov 2025) | 8 | $M
Reported uptake increase, low end | 127 | %
Reported uptake increase, high end | 145 | %
The numbers above sit in different units and tell different stories: how much capital Cordance has to work with, and what its lead preclinical collaboration showed. Both will need to grow considerably before a pivotal trial.
What bears say, what bulls answer
The most credible pushback is competitive. Insightec has a multi-year head start, an installed base of Exablate systems in major academic centers, and ongoing trials in the same indications Cordance is targeting [PRNewswire, November 2025 references competitive context]. A bear would argue that even a technically elegant second entrant has a hard time displacing an incumbent with regulatory momentum and KOL relationships. The bull answer, supported by the Breakthrough Device Designation and the published first-in-human sonobiopsy work, is that the diagnostic use case is genuinely underserved and that a lower-cost, neuronavigation-guided system opens community oncology sites that an MRI-guided platform structurally cannot reach. Categories this large rarely consolidate to a single device.
What to watch
The next 12 months should bring clarity on three fronts: enrollment and readout from an expanded sonobiopsy clinical study in high-grade glioma, a likely Series A to fund pivotal-scale work, and any deepening of the EXACT Therapeutics collaboration into a named human trial of radiopharmaceutical delivery. For a glioblastoma patient today, the standard of care, maximal safe resection followed by radiation and temozolomide per the Stupp protocol, has not meaningfully shifted the survival curve since 2005. Any device that lets oncologists see what the tumor is doing in real time, or get a real dose of drug into it, is worth watching closely, with the appropriate patience that brain cancer trials demand.
Pulse Raman covers biotech, digital health, and clinical AI for Startuply.