GRAIL is initially funded by over $100 million in Series A financing from Illumina and ARCH Venture Partners, with participating investments from Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates and Sutter Hill Ventures.
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“We hope today is a turning point in the war on cancer”, Jay Flatley, Illumina’s CEO and Grail’s chairman of the board, said Sunday in a news release.
San Diego-based DNA sequencing company Illumina plans to build startup Grail to offer liquid biopsy to the market. While most of our DNA is inside our cells, scientists use CNAs as a non-invasive way to test for cancer and other signs of disease. Illumina will be the majority owner.
At a breakout at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference on Monday, Illumina’s chief executive Jay Flatley explained just how hard a task the new company faces. Grail would use ultra-deep gene sequencing to look for the characteristic nucleic acids that are shed into the blood by tumors.
Tech luminaries Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have led a $100 million round of funding for Grail, a new company that is developing a blood test that can detect many kinds of cancer much earlier than doctors are now able to.
CHICAGO – Gene sequencing company Illumina is going after the next big advance in cancer detection, working to develop a universal blood test to identify early stage cancers in people with no symptoms of the disease.
Forget biopsies, ultrasounds, mammograms, pap smears, rectal exams, and other unpleasant cancer screenings-the race is now on for simple, affordable blood tests that can detect all sorts of cancers extremely early.
In an interview Flatley said, “We’ve made tremendous progress, which gives us the confidence that we can get to the endpoint that we expect”. Its machines are used by researchers, doctors, and consumer companies to do everything from understanding different types of cancer to decoding someone’s ancestry.
The blood tests will work by ferreting out specific fragments of DNA or RNA that have escaped from tumors and take laps through the circulatory system.
But existing technology works best in more advance stages of cancer, when tumors are shedding substantial amounts of DNA into the bloodstream.
However, there are caveats to cancers detected very early.
Pathway Genomics’ screening test claiming to detect 10 cancers in healthy people drew the ire of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) past year, which sent the company a letter saying the test “had not received adequate clinical validation and may harm the public health”.
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Flatley said Grail will consult early on with the FDA to see what evidence the agency needs for the test and will likely seek its approval. A ctDNA test that can screen for stage 2 cancers such as breast, colon, prostate and ovarian could translate into a $20 billion to $40 billion market, Flatley said.
