J&J, Amazon Among Investors In Grail's $900 Million Funding Round
By Jof Enriquez,
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Early cancer-detection startup Grail, a spin-off from genetics company Illumina, has raised over $900 million in an initial Series B round of financing led by ARCH Venture Partners, with Johnson & Johnson Innovation as the largest investor.
Illumina in January 2016 announced the launch of Grail, which will attempt to commercialize liquid biopsy technology using cell-free DNA as a biomarker, and whose market is predicted to be worth $10 billion annually by the end of the decade. Specifically, Grail is using deep sequencing of circulating cell-free nucleic acids (cfNAs) to develop assays to detect cancer early in blood, and is planning to market a blood test for less than $1,000.
Grail says it will use the proceeds of the financing "for continued product development and validation of blood tests for early-stage cancer detection, including the previously announced Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas (CCGA) study and other large-scale clinical trials that are expected to enroll hundreds of thousands of patients."
CCGA will use Grail’s high-intensity (ultra-broad and ultra-deep) sequencing approach – leveraging Illumina sequencing technology – to collect biological samples from donors with a new diagnosis of cancer (blood and tumor tissue), and from donors who do not have a diagnosis of cancer (blood). This will characterize the population heterogeneity in cancer and non-cancer subjects, and will help in developing models for distinguishing cancer from non-cancer.
“We envision a global community that benefits from early-stage cancer detection where fewer individuals face the anguish of late-stage diagnosis and devastating outcomes,” said Jeff Huber, Grail’s CEO, in a press release. “I believe that Grail’s approach leveraging high-intensity sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and state of the art Computer Science and Data Science is unparalleled in the field of cancer detection. Our team made tremendous progress in 2016 and I look forward to additional clinical and strategic milestones.”
This week's Series B round raised more than $900 million. ARCH Venture Partners led the round, which included Johnson & Johnson Innovation as the largest investor. Others who participated include Amazon, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, McKesson Ventures, Merck (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada), Tencent Holdings Limited, and Varian Medical Systems, Inc.
Grail is working with Goldman Sachs on a second close that will raise the Series B funding total to at least $1 billion, and possibly up to $1.8 billion, according to TechCrunch.
The company received an initial $100 million investment from Illumina, ARCH Venture Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates, and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Another liquid biopsy startup, Freenome, also raised $65 million in a Series A round from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz and Google. The latest round brings the total amount raised by the South San Francisco-based startup to $71.2 million, reports ZDNet.